Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Authors & Writing.
National Observer became my road gig out of San Francisco. I was too much for them. I would wander in on off hours drunk and obviously on drugs, asking for my messages. Essentially, they were working for me. They liked me, ,but I was the Bull in the China Shop --- The more I wrote about politics the more they realized who they had on their hands. they knew I wouldn't change and neither would they.
Hunter S. Thompson, Songs Of The
I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials . . . from Hell's Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence.
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
John Ruskin
Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.
Delmore Schwartz
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
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
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
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.
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.
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.
You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
George Eliot
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
Ken Kesey
An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.
Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.
Raymond Chandler
Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.
Philip Roth
Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.
Leo Rosten
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.
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
