Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Authors & Writing.
What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0300/dubus/interview.html
Andre Dubus, from an interview b
I think what I love most about writing is that feeling that you really nailed something. I rarely feel it with a whole piece, but sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.
Andre Dubus
The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.
Andre Maurois
It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
W. Somerset Maugham
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
Arnold Bennett
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
J. Russel Lynes
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.
Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promi
What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith
When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
Enrique Jardiel Poncela
The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.
Richard Harding Davis
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay;
Sir Philip Sidney
What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.
Edward Dahlberg
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Readers of the twenty-first chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably know or is really a discardable limb. I meant the book to end in this way, but my aesthetic judgement may have been faulty. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics. 'Quod scripsi scripsi' said Pontius Pilate when he made Jesus Christ the King of the Jews. 'What I have written I have Written.' We can destroy what we have written but we cannot unwrite it. I leave what I wrote with what Dr. Johnson called frigid indifference to the judgement of that .00000001 of the American population which cares about such things. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess, November, 1986
There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident, which must have cost many a smile to the intending romancer who was keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance- to answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture, one says of character, when one says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it?
Henry James, essay The Art of Fi
One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having to come to grips with it. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it. So I use writing as a learning tool.
Hunter S. Thompson, Songs Of The
