Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Authors & Writing.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
E. L. Doctorow
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.
Georges Simenon
Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
Brian W. Aldiss
My father was a scared man. And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most writers I wanted to make a practical go of it. And my career was eminently practical. I fastened on to this magazine, the New Yorker, that seemed to me to be the top of its class and I tried to get into it, and I did get into it. It was kind of calculating. Kind of crass.But I framed it to myself as a kind of altruistic ambition. Most jobs in the world were competitive, you had to push someone aside, but writing and art I thought weren't like that. You brought something new into the world without displacing anything else. To entertain people, or to hold out a standard of beauty or to even inform them seemed so self-evidently out of what my father called the rat race. Dog eat dog, in his phrase. He had a despairing picture of the capitalist world, as losers in that system tend to do.
John Updike
To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.
Harold Nicolson
Words and sentences are subject to revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.
Barrett Wendell
I wrote a poem to the moon But no one noticed it;Although I hoped that late or soonSomeone would praise a bitIts purity and grace forlone,Its beauty tulip-cool...But as my poem died still-born,I felt a fool.I wrote a verse of vulgar trendSpiced with an oath or two;I tacked a snapper at the endAnd called it Dan McGrew.I spouted it to bar-room boys,Full fifty years away;Yet still with rude and ribald noiseIt lives today.'Tis bitter truth, but there you are-That's how a name is made;Write of a rose, a lark, a star,You'll never make the grade.But write of gutter and of grime,Of pimp and prostitute,The multitude will read your rhyme,And pay to boot.So what's the use to burn and bleedAnd strive for beauty's sake?No one your poetry will read,Your heart will only break.But set your song in vulgar pitch,If rhyme you will not rue,And make your heroine a bitch...Like Lady Lou.
Robert William Service, My Cross
Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame, if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.
John Wesley
Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!
Herman Melville
The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.
George Sand
I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
George Eliot
Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.
James J. Corbett
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Virginia Woolf
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.
To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do.
Aristotle
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.
