Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Authors & Writing.
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
Alexander Pope
Ten censure wrong, for one that writes amiss.
Most authors steal their works, or buy.
Why did I write? What sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents , or my own?
I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.
Walker Percy, Interview, 1989
I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright. But I'm not.
Alan Bennett
If you don
James Atlas, essay: The Fall of
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Colette
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb
As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.
You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.
Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)
Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
Virginia Woolf
There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it
Tobias Wolff
Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated
William Carlos Williams, Journal
Richard Bach with this book does two things. He gives me Flight. He makes me Young. For both I am deeply grateful.
Ray Bradbury
I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.
Charles Caleb Colton
I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.
Mel Brooks
The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said:
Graham Wallas, The Art of Though
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
George Orwell