Writing Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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