Writers Quotes - Page 2

My own experience is that once a story has been written one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If in the first chapter you say there is a gun hanging on the wall you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.

(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Mary Heaton Worse

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

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

Write something even if it's just a suicide note.

Anonymous

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

Nature not content with denying him the ability to think has endowed him with the ability to write.

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.

When an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Henry David Thoreau

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.

Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.

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.

My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Robert Browning

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

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months but you don't earn the fourth without it.

Mordecai Richler

John the Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx.

Anonymous

Every word she writes is a lie including 'and' and 'the'.

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.

Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

Get black on white.

Guy de Maupassant

Writers write to influence their readers their preachers their auditors but always at bottom to be more themselves.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

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

It is a sobering thought that each of us gives his hearers and his readers a chance to look into the inner working of his mind when he speaks or writes.

Read over your compositions and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine strike it out.

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human and he responds emotionally but at the same time there's this cold observer who cannot cry.

When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'

The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book I assure you.

The obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Just get it down on paper and then we'll see what to do with it.

Maxwell Perkins

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

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.

Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons he would lose his angels.

Self-expression is for babies and seals where it can be charming. A writer's business is to affect the reader.

There is but one art to omit.

Robert Louis Stevenson

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.

Alfred North Whitehead

If we try to envisage an 'average Canadian writer' we can see him living near a campus teaching at least part-time at university level mingling too much for his work's good with academics doing as much writing as he can for the CBC and always hoping for a Canada Council Fellowship.

George Woodcock

The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written ... she is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in them but now they seem hardly to belong to her - and probably she is involved with another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.

Every author however modest keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

George Bernard Shaw

I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.

Washington Irving

That's not writing that's typing.

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

I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.

T.S Eliot

I think with my right hand.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

I quote others in order to better express my own self.

Michel de Montaigne

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed in keeping rabbits.

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

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself- it is the occurring which is difficult.

Stephen Leacock

Writing when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

Laurence Sterne

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