Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Authors & Writing.
I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.
Kate Chopin
The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning.
Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Pea
Make em laugh; make em cry; make em wait.
Charles Reade
Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.
Santha Rama Rau
Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
Blaise Cendrars Sauser
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Octavio Paz
Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.
Carl Van Doren
...There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning... When one says picture, one says of character, when one says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?... It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character. If you say you don't see it (character in that
Henry James, The Art of Fiction,
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Stephen King
I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.
George Konrad
One can write out of love or hate. Hate tells one a great deal about a person. Love makes one become the person. Love, contrary to legend, is not half as blind, at least for writing purposes, as hate. Love can see the evil and not cease to be love. Hate cannot see the good and remain hate. The writer, writing out of hatred, will, thus, paint a far more partial picture than if he had written out of love.
Jessamyn West, To See the Dream,
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
James Joyce
We turn first ter the bleedin' parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare collocated by Guvnor Cruickshank ter make manifest Massinger's indebtedness. I'll get out me spoons. One of the surest of tests is the way in wich a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets nick; bad poets deface wot they take, and right good poets make it into sumfink better, or at least sumfink different. The bloody right good poet welds 'is theft into a 'oole of feelin' wich is unique, right, utterly different from that from wich it were torn; the bad poet frows it into sumfink wich 'as no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from auffors remote in time, or alien in 'am sandwich, right, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The bleedin' two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from 'im; 'e is too close ter ffem ter be of use ter ffem in this way. Massinger, as Guvnor Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a right good deal.note: this is the original spelling as Lewis wrote it. Also: see a quote attributed to T.S. Eliot
C.S. Lewis, The Sacred Wood: Ess
Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.
Jean Paul Richter
You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
Ian Mcewan
Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.
Nancy Banks Smith
Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.
Dr. Walter Smith
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
A. J. Liebling
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him to the public.
Sir Winston Churchill
A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.
Jorge Luis Borges
