Writing Quotes

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understa...

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most ...

Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late becaus...

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

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the dec...

For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of dep...

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen whic...

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts...

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

There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a nov...

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing...

The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself ...

After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for posterity.

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 ...

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language the struggle of the ade...

A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for h...

Memoirs: the backstairs of history.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writ...

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an ...

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever wri...

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One w...

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to aba...

Good novel are written by people who are not frightened.

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

Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

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

Good writing is like a windowpane.

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do t...

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about t...

The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restles...

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the ski...

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like...

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horri...

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thu...

Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and ...

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the...

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a myster...

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words an...

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this...

It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of b...

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we...

I knew that, when writing a book, you're not constrained by a budget. You're not constrained by what...

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.

It's not a career for anyone who needs or values security. It's a career for gamblers. Every time yo...

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

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the ...

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

I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, ...

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

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

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of t...

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

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is...

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

If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being rea...

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including t...

The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?

Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the r...

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what...

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

I am too sick to be out of bed, too crazy to sleep, and am surrounded by horrors.

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He ...

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take ...

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing...

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym An...

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

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

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without...

‏Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work.

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

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

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint ca...

I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie out...

I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the wee...

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping...

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to loo...

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint c...

He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infect...

May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It's like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith - where they flail...

So I have 8 to 10 screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favorite stor...

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

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.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

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

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your un...

Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women