Quotes by American Authors - Page 24

You have to throw yourself away when you write.
Maxwell Perkins
I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.
Maxwell Perkins
Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer when he tried to write of some particular day he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense but that ability is at the bottom of writing I am sure.
Maxwell Perkins
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.
Anaïs Nin
Now as through this world I ramble I see lots of funny men Some rob you with a six gun Some with a fountain pen.
Woody Guthrie
Words and sentences are subjects of revision paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.
Barrett Wendell
If a man means his writing seriously he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.
John Ciardi
A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language trying to get human feelings right.
John K. Hutchens
Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.
Saul Bellow
It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
Sholem Asch
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
Saul Bellow
(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Mary Heaton Worse
There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths and the lesser ones who can only give you themselves.
Clifton Fadiman
He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.
Irving Howe
I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.
Mark Twain
They're fancy talkers about themselves writers. If I had to give young writers advice I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman
As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground.
Henry David Thoreau
Footnotes the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.
William James
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.
Ernest Hemingway
Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
John Hersey
When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do - well that's memoirs.
Will Rogers
Every word she writes is a lie including 'and' and 'the'.
Mary McCarthy
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Thomas Wolfe
We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
Henry David Thoreau
Every writer without exception is a masochist a sadist a peeping Tom an exhibitionist a narcissist an injustice collector and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity.
Edmund Bergler
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau
It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win hold or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.
John Mason Brown
Self-expression is for babies and seals where it can be charming. A writer's business is to affect the reader.
Vincent McHugh
Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons he would lose his angels.
Dakin Williams
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words a paragraph no unnecessary sentences for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline but that every word tell.
William Strunk
Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man write about a man.
E B White
Just get it down on paper and then we'll see what to do with it.
Maxwell Perkins
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Edna Ferber
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway
In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
Edith Wharton
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.
Theodore Isaac Rubin
I think with my right hand.
Edmund Wilson
I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.
T.S Eliot
There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis of details. I often say that one must permit oneself and quite advisedly and deliberately a certain margin of misstatement.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
That's not writing that's typing.
Truman Capote
I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.
Washington Irving
Every author however modest keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Logan Pearsall Smith
I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth.
Henry Miller
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The writer must write what he has to say not speak it.
Ernest Hemingway
There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names identities personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
Mel Brooks
I can write better than anyone who can write faster and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.
A.J. Liebling
There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism in a sense to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses their meannesses to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat as it were without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction.
Saul Bellow
The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.
Saul Bellow
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J.P. Donleavy
Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Thought flies and words go on foot.
Julien Green
No tears and the writer no tears and the reader.
Robert Frost
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.
W.H. Auden
I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.
William Stafford