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Writers on writing

147 quotes, 123 writers

A. J. Ayer

  • Sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood.

A. L. Kennedy

  • You can, of course, steal stories and attributes from family and friends, fill in filecards after lovemaking and so forth. It might be better to celebrate those you love — and love itself — by writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity intact.

Adrienne Rich

  • Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction — is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

Agatha Christie

  • I don't think necessity is the mother of invention — invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

Alain de Botton

  • There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

Alan Bennett

  • Drama is the back-stairs of the intellect. Philosophers and historians go in by the front door, but playwrights and novelists sneak up the back stairs with their more disreputable luggage.

Albert Camus

  • But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.

Aldous Huxley

  • The proper study of mankind is books.

Alfred Kazin

  • A classic book is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.

Alice Munro

  • Any story that is any good, is usually going to change.

Amos Oz

  • When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book.

Angie Thomas

  • When those emotions are fueled into our writing, our readers have no choice but to share them […] That, to me, is how empathy is born.

Ann Patchett

  • Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

Annie Dillard

  • One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.
  • The writer is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.

Anthony Hope

  • His foe was folly and his weapon wit.

Anthony Trollope

  • Contentment and fulfilment don't make for very good fiction.

Anton Chekhov

  • There is nothing new in art except talent.

Artemus Ward

  • Mr. C. had talent, but he couldn't spel. No man has a right to be a lit'rary man onless he knows how to spel. It is a pity that Chawcer, who had geneyus, was so unedicated. He's the wus speller I know of.

August Wilson

  • Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking. The important thing is not to censor them.

Ben Jonson

  • Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things.

Ben Okri

  • A novel is a river, but a short story is a glass of water. A novel is a forest, but the short story is a seed. It is more atomic. The atom may contain the secret structures of the universe.

Ben Schott

  • Pedantry is rarely the mother of creativity.
  • If Twitter or Facebook is the answer, it's probably the wrong question.

Bernard Cornwell

  • You are going to get things wrong. None of us mean to, but we do.
  • Writing can be encouraged, perhaps, but taught? To teach something implies there is something to be taught and that suggests that the activity can be reduced to, if not rules, maxims. But there are no rules except to tell a story.

Blaise Pascal

  • The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.

Brian Moore

  • Do a minimum of research, and then keep it out. Don't let it impede the story.

Charles Baudelaire

  • No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.

Charles Lamb

  • I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  • And so when it's difficult, what keeps me going is the possibility of joy.

Christopher Darlington Morley

  • There is only one rule for being a good talker — learn to listen.

Clarence Shepard Day

  • The artistic impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us halfway, after the idea is born; and if we go on, art is labor.

Colette

  • No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.

Cyril Connolly

  • If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.
  • Better to write for yourself and have no public, than write for the public and have no self.

D. H. Lawrence

  • I like to write when I feel spiteful: it's like having a good sneeze.

Dashiell Hammett

  • It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.

David Hare

  • I wasn't born until I started to write.

David Hewson

  • There's no point in trying to analyse the creative urge. You either have it or you don't.

David Mitchell

  • Neglect everything else.

Dawn French

  • I don't read novels whilst I'm writing one; I just haven't got a wide enough brain to concentrate on incoming and outgoing in the same time zone.

Deborah Harkness

  • One of the techniques that they use to cope is to imagine a world outside of the one they occupy and to invest that world with all sorts of powerful beings.

Dorothy Parker

  • This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

E. L. Doctorow

  • There is no longer any such thing as fiction or non-fiction; there's only narrative.
  • The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Elizabeth Gilbert

  • The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you.
  • I try to remain stubborn in my gladness.

Emily Post

  • Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.

Erica Jong

  • I went for years not finishing anything because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.

Ernest Hemingway

  • The most essential gift for any writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
  • Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
  • You can stroke people with words.

Ferenc Molnár

  • First, I did it for my own pleasure. Then I did it for the pleasure of my friends. And now — I do it for money.

Francis Bacon

  • Words are the tokens current and accepted for conceits, as moneys are for values.
  • It is generally better to deal by speech than by letter.
  • Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
  • Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

George Steiner

  • Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

Gillian Flynn

  • Sit myself in my chair and threaten myself like a recalcitrant child: you will sit in this chair and you will not move until you get this scene written, missy.

Gustave Flaubert

  • Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
  • Read in order to live.

H. G. Wells

  • If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.

H. L. Mencken

  • The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

Hart Crane

  • One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

Heinrich Heine

  • The arrow belongs not to the archer when it has once left the bow; the word no longer belongs to the speaker when it has once passed his lips.

Helen Keller

  • No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Henry James

  • In art economy is always beauty.

Isabel Allende

  • Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn't get processed in the mind until you do the editing.

J. B. Priestley

  • There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.

J. Logan Pearsall Smith

  • Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.

Jack London

  • You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

James Thurber

  • It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.
  • Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

Jean-Paul Sartre

  • Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them… there's nothing.
  • Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

Jeanette Winterson

  • Praise and blame are much the same for the writer. One is better for your vanity, but neither gets you much further with your work.

Jennifer Egan

  • Exercising is a good analogy for writing. If you're not used to exercising you want to avoid it forever.

Jerome K. Jerome

  • Conceit is the finest armour a man can wear.
  • It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

  • I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing.

Jodi Picoult

  • I may write garbage, but you can always edit garbage. You can't edit a blank page.

John Burroughs

  • To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

John Fowles

  • There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common — a need to create an alternative world.

John Green

  • I also like to remind myself of something my dad said in [response] to writers' block: 'Coal miners don't get coal miners' block.'

John McPhee

  • Writers come in two principal categories — those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure — and they can all use help.

John Stuart Mill

  • All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

Joseph Addison

  • Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

José Ortega y Gasset

  • The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.

Joyce Carol Oates

  • The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
  • Unless you are writing something very post-modernist — self-conscious, self-reflexive and 'provocative' — be alert for possibilities of using plain familiar words in place of polysyllabic 'big' words.

Jules Renard

  • Clarity is the politeness of the man of letters.
  • Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.

Julian Barnes

  • Literature is also a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you'll never meet.

Karl Kraus

  • It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.
  • The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.

Karl Shapiro

  • Self-knowledge is a dangerous thing, tending to make man shallow or insane.

Lee Hall

  • Don't stuff your manuscript into an envelope as soon as you've written 'The End'. You owe it to yourself to get the script into the best possible state before anyone sees it.

Lu Xun

  • My motive is to expose the illness in order to induce people to pay attention to its cure.

Maksim Gorky

  • You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.

Mao Zedong

  • To read too many books is harmful.

Mark Billingham

  • It is important to remember that lies (white or whoppers) and luck (of both kinds) may play a disproportionately large part in the way things turn out.
  • I am a writer because I'm a reader.

Mark Haddon

  • Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

Mark Twain

  • It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

Matt Haig

  • Be ship-shape. An ocean liner might be big, but all the screws need to be tight. Or you end up drowning. So, y'know, observe each sentence as if it was the only one.

Max Beerbohm

  • Only the insane take themselves quite seriously.

Maya Angelou

  • Youthful cynicism is sad to observe, because it indicates not so much knowledge learned from bitter experiences as insufficient trust even to attempt the future.
  • If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
  • Nothing will work unless you do.

Michael Morpurgo

  • I write very small so I don't have to turn the page and face the next empty one.

Montesquieu

  • I suffer from the disease of writing and being ashamed of them when they are finished.

Neil Gaiman

  • Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Norman Mailer

  • Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

Noël Coward

  • Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.

P. D. James

  • Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
  • I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

  • Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Peter Ustinov

  • To refuse an award is another way of accepting them with more noise than normal.

Philip Larkin

  • I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: it's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

Philip Roth

  • The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

Ray Bradbury

  • You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

Raymond Chandler

  • When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split.

Robert Graves

  • Most people are dead by their late 20s.

Robert Louis Stevenson

  • The cruellest lies are often told in silence.

Robertson Davies

  • I often read, with amazement, of people who suffer from writer's block; I might enjoy a wee block, just to have time to catch my breath.

Roxane Gay

  • I've never waited for the confidence to do anything, because if I was waiting for confidence, I would still be waiting.

Ruth Rendell

  • I get a lot of letters from people. They say, 'I want to be a writer. What should I do?' I tell them to stop writing to me and get on with it.

Sam Shepard

  • I'm a great believer in chaos. I don't believe that you start with a formula and then you fulfill the formula.

Sarah Crossan

  • If I wanted to achieve my dream of writing for a living, I had to believe in myself, otherwise no one else would.

Shirley Conran

  • But you have to be efficient if you're going to be lazy.

Susan Sontag

  • If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Sylvia Plath

  • The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Thomas Carlyle

  • A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
  • I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

Thomas De Quincey

  • All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.

Toni Morrison

  • People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

Truman Capote

  • A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

W. H. Auden

  • Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered.

Wallace Stevens

  • The imagination is the only genius. It is intrepid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in its abstraction. The achievement of the romantic, however, lies in minor wish-fulfillments and it is incapable of abstraction.
  • Imagination… is the irrepressible revolutionist.

William Blake

  • To generalize is to be an idiot.

William Dalrymple

  • You often come across the best stories when you least expect them.

William Faulkner

  • Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good.

William Hazlitt

  • The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.

Zora Neale Hurston

  • Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.