Writers Quotes

A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to acc...

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

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

I think with my right hand.

Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve ex...

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a ...

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above...

How become a writer? Naturally.

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society ...

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad ...

The fluid boundary between individuals and types is a true concern of the real writer.

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work — one that is just about respect...

Lindsay [Doran] goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in...

Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector. This is the write...

The writer must write what he has to say not speak it.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are f...

A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth...

His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of hi...

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, t...

The journey took about a week each way, and each day had my parents both in its grip. Riding behind ...

Literature is language charged with meaning

When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been cr...

Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.

Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political...

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narra...

Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like...

All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of...

The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to...

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriter...

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.", July 5, 1922]

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insa

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day a novel should not be inter...

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the l...

Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you wan...

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

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the ...

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

Memoirs: the backstairs of history.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's d...

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development....

I often said that writers are of two types.There is the architect, which is one type. The architect,...

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everyt...

Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: ‘What’s great about tha...

And it’s great to have all these readers and fans who, for the most part, are very nice people, sayi...

J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presqu...

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature ...

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

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

A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not."(on Ezra Pound)

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

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in orde...

All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea.

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can'...

Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way i...

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't pl...

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – ...

Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in...

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does

Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondere...

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, ...

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creati...

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself...

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’...

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell sue...

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too h...

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seein...

There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more

In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from h...

Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not questio...

Who can think of Larkin now without considering his fondness for the buttocks of schoolgirls and par...

Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than...

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a nove...

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer,...

Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work ...

As I mentioned briefly on the phone, the best thing about the Air Chrysalis is that it's not an imit...

We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could h...

As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a sto...

The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to ...

Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination.

I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth so help me God. And I thought I...

His imagination seemed still to exhaust itself in running, before it tried to leap the ditch. While ...