Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Authors & Writing.
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
Virginia Woolf
Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls
William Styron, Quoted in James
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
Andre Gide
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
Richard Bach
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.
Joseph Addison
The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
Ernest Hemingway, quoted in A.E.
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.
By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.
Carlos Fuentes
Our work is to present things that are as they are.
Frederick the Great
Nothing a man writes can please him as profoundly as something he does with his back, shoulders and hands. For writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation.
Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the
Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poe
I have used these weeks to revalue values. Do you understand this expression? When you come right down to it, the alchemist is the most praiseworthy of men: I mean the one who changes something negligible or contemptible into something of value, even gold. He alone enriches, the others merely exchange. My task is quite singular this time: I have asked myself what mankind has always hated, feared, and despised the most
Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to G
A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
The waste basket is a writer's best friend.
The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.
Source Unknown
All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
Richard Hughes
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
Janet Frame
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
Oscar Wilde
