Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Authors & Writing.
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
Lord (George Gordon) Byron
If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
Salman Rushdie
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.
The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.
When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Seneca (Seneca the Elder)
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness.
Julia Ward Howe
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
John Steinbeck
If they have a popular thought they have to go into a darkened room and lie down until it passes.
Kelvin Mackenzie
It requires more than mere genius to be an author.
Jean de la Bruyere
Editing is the same as quarreling with writers -- same thing exactly.
Harold Wallace Ross
A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.
Anatole France
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
John Irving, Interview in Writer
If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
Quentin Crisp
Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.
Source Unknown
