Authors & Writing Quotes

There's more of yourself in a book than a play. that's why we know all about Dickens and not much about Shakespeare. Ben Jonson murdered people; Marlowe was a spy; Shakespeare just sat in the corner and took notes.

Sir John Mortimer

To finish is a sadness to a writer - a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.

John Steinbeck

I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all humbug.

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promi

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Benjamin Disraeli

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Aleister Crowley

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

Johann von Goethe

So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.

William Hazlitt

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas. . . a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

William S. Burroughs, Remark, 19

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.

J. R. R. Tolkien

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Cynthia Ozick

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Omar Khayyam

The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Leon Edel

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Clifton Fadiman

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Clifton Fadiman

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Bertrand Russell

Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.

Pearl Buck

Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler, see what I am, and what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, and what language I have been obliged to treat them with to deal with them in their own way; -- all this comes of Authorship.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron