Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Authors & Writing.
I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.
TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
Mario Vargas Llosa
The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.
Renata Adler
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
Joseph Joubert
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
Harold Pinter
After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.
Henry Miller
A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.
The bee himself did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me, and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emil
A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.
JeanPaul Sartre, Upon refusing t
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
James A. Michener
Would you not like to try all sorts of lives -- one is so very small -- but that is the satisfaction of writing -- one can impersonate so many people.
Katherine Mansfield
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.
W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's
Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.
Jean Baudrillard
On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.
Charles Baudelaire
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
William Zinsser
Writing is thinking on paper.
Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Writing is a craft not an art.
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Samuel Butler
