Quotes about writers-and-writing

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

— Olin Miller

Let those who would write heroic poems make their life an heroic poem.

— John Milton

All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

— Edmund Morrison

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

— Toni Morrison

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

— John Mortimer

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

— Iris Murdoch

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

— Vladimir Nabokov

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

— V. S. Naipaul

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

— Howard Nemerov

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

— Harold Nicolson

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

— Gregory Nunn

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

— Flannery O'Connor

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

— George Orwell

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

— George Orwell

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

— George Orwell

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

— George Orwell

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

— Cynthia Ozick

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

— Dorothy Parker

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

— Blaise Pascal

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

— Blaise Pascal

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

— Octavio Paz

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

— Harold Pinter

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

— Luigi Pirandello

Most authors steal their works, or buy.

— Alexander Pope

Ten censure wrong, for one that writes amiss.

— Alexander Pope

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents , or my own?

— Alexander Pope

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

— Cole Porter

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

— Ezra Pound

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

— Ezra Pound

I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

— Marcel Proust

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

— Craig Raine

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

— Burton Rascoe

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

— Santha Rama Rau

Make em laugh; make em cry; make em wait.

— Charles Reade

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

— Anne Rice

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

— Mordecai Richler

Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.

— Jean Paul Richter

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

— Leo Rosten

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

— Leo Rosten

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

— Leo Rosten

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

— Salman Rushdie

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

— Salman Rushdie

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

— Salman Rushdie

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

— Salman Rushdie

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them.

— John Ruskin

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

— Bertrand Russell

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

— Vita Sackville-West

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

— Francoise Sagan

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

— George Sand

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

— Blaise Cendrars Sauser

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

— Seneca

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

— George Bernard Shaw

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

— George Bernard Shaw

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

— Irwin Shaw

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Thus, with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: Fool! said my muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.

— Sir Philip Sidney

Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.

— Georges Simenon

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

— Dr. Walter Smith

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

— Nancy Banks Smith

The writer does the most good who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.

— Sydney Smith

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

— Socrates

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

— Philippe Sollers

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

— Susan Sontag

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

— Susan Sontag

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

— John Steinbeck

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

— John Steinbeck

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

— John Steinbeck

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

— Gloria Steinem

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

— Robert Stone

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

— J. August Strindberg

Let's face it, writing is hell.

— William Styron

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

— Jonathan Swift

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

— Jonathan Swift

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

— J. M. Synge

The two most engaging powers of a good author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.

— William M. Thackeray

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

— Henry David Thoreau

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

— Henry David Thoreau

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

— James Thurber

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

— James Thurber

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

— Count Leo Tolstoy

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

— Alexander Trocchi

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.

— Mark Twain

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

— Mark Twain

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

— Mark Twain

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

— Source Unknown

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

— Source Unknown

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

— Source Unknown

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

— Source Unknown

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

— Source Unknown

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

— Source Unknown

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

— Source Unknown

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

— Source Unknown

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

— Gore Vidal

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

— Gore Vidal