Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Authors & Writing.
In this new book, I open with a Hebrew quotation nobody is able to understand. This is in order to say, O.K., do you want to play this game? You are my friend, and we go. Otherwise, too bad for me or for you. I think it is untrue that my books are impenetrable. On the contrary, I think I am a sort of great vulgarizer. I put down certain difficult stuff, but I give my readers clues to understand what this kind of stuff is.
Umberto Eco, Interview: regardin
A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.
Gregory Nunn
Author: A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come.
Charles Montesquieu
Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing
Hilaire Belloc
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
Oliver Herford
Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.
Toni Morrison
Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
A book should be luminous not voluminous.
Christian Nevell Bovee
Writers are the main landmarks of the past.
Edward George BulwerLytton
I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul
Easy writings curse is hard reading.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
H. L. Mencken
To write is a humiliation.
Edward Dahlberg
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.
Washington Irving
It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.
Jorge Luis Borges, cited in A bi
I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides, poisons are neat and clean and really exciting... I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse.
Agatha Christie
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html
William Faulkner, speech at the
Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson
