Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Authors & Writing.
One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.
Oscar Wilde
You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
George Bernard Shaw
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
The author should be in his work like God is in the universe--present everywhere and visible nowhere.L'auteur dans son oeuvre doit etre comme Dieu dans l'univers, present partout et visible nulle part.
Gustave Flaubert
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.
Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style? and avoid How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
James Joyce
When I heard the word stream uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.
Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.
Paul J. Meyer
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
Gore Vidal
I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
Thomas Carlyle
I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.
Jack Kerouac
There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Before I explain my book to others, I expect them to explain it to me. To claim to explain it first is to immediately narrow down its reach; for if we know what we intended to say, we do not know whether we said only that. - One always says more than THAT. - And what interests me most is what I put in without knowing, - that unconscious share, which I would like to call God's share.
Andre Gide, Paludes Marshlands
All these books have lived together ... inside my mind. They follow one another only on paper and because of an utter impossibility to let themselves be all written at the same time. Whatever book I write, I never devote myself to it completely, and the matter which most insistently requires me soon later develops, however, at the other end of me.
Andre Gide, Journal, SeptemberOc
This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
Sir Winston Churchill
Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.
Lucy Ellman
