Authors & Writing Quotes

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Anne Rice

The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it.

Robert Coover

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

William Golding, Rough Magic Lec

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Ernest Hemingway

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Ernest Hemingway

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Ernest Hemingway

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Ernest Hemingway

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Ernest Hemingway

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Ernest Hemingway

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Groucho Marx

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Don Marquis

Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. And what are you reading, Miss -- -? Oh! it is only a novel! replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda ; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

Jane Austen

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

Henry James

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

Henry James

Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.

Charles Caleb Colton

I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea, voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being truth itself, is one -- one for all men and for all occupations.

Joseph Conrad

The two most engaging powers of a good author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.

William Makepeace Thackeray

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Larry McMurtry

Thus, with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: Fool! said my muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.

Sir Philip Sidney