Writers Quotes

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

Your manuscript is both good and original but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good.

I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.

Charles Baudelaire

Writing has power but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind but they can't direct it. Time changes things God changes things the dictators change things but writers can't change anything.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

A good writer is basically a story-teller not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

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

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

Maxwell Perkins

A memorandum is written to protect the writer - not to inform his reader.

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers dear Readers are an afterthought.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you there of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right But where's the bloody horse?

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must seem to be inevitable.

Raymond Chandler

On the trail of another man the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.

Paul Murray Kendall

The editorial job has become unlike the ancient age when one judged what one read a job of making judgements on outlines ideas reputations previous books scenarios treatments talk and promises.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.

T.S Eliot

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

Laurence Clark Powell

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.

How can you write if you can't cry?

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

Marshall McLuhan

It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

I've put my genius into my life I've only put my talent into my works.

Fundamentally all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying about the brief flicker of time we have here and the frustrations that it creates.

Mordecai Richler

I am what libraries and librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.

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.

If you would be a reader read if a writer write.

Epictetus

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language trying to get human feelings right.

John K. Hutchens

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

Please never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.

Alexander Pushkin

The waste basket is a writer's best friend.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.

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.

Words and sentences are subjects of revision paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.

Barrett Wendell

There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.

J. Middleton Murry

The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.

Robertson Davies

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.

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.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.

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

The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness when in fact I am amiable indulgent affectionate shy and rather timid at heart.

The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance the farther there is to go and the more there is to say the less time there is to say it.

It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.

Nicola Chiaromonte

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

I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Footnotes the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.

I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.

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

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.

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

The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.

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.

He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.

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

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