Famous Quotes About Writers and Writing By Reference

-232 Items- A great collection of quotes about Writers and Writing. Quotations are arranged alphabetically and can be sorted by any header. This list of Writers and Writing sayings and quotes includes the sources and authors of the Writers and Writing quotes when possible. We hope you find this list of quotations about the topic Writers and Writing useful as a reference list or informative as you surf the web, and you can find many other lists of quotes about subjects on Ranker. You're able to copy this list to build your own just like it, re-rank it to fit your opinions, then publish it to share with your friends.

Print Blog View Views: 1308 Items: 232

< >

Show: 25 100

Order Name Author Subjects

1

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Christian Nevell Bovee

Writers and Writing
2

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Cyril Connolly

Writers and Writing
3

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Henry Miller

Writers and Writing
4

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

Henry David Thoreau

Writers and Writing
5

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Richard Bach

Writers and Writing
6

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Ernest Hemingway

Writers and Writing
7

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Virginia Woolf

Writers and Writing
8

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Gaston Bachelard

Writers and Writing
9

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Gregory Nunn

Writers and Writing
10

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

Leo Tolstoy

Writers and Writing
11

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

Karl Kraus

Writers and Writing
12

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Leo Rosten

Writers and Writing
13

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Henry Miller

Writers and Writing
14

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Writers and Writing
15

All the world knows me in my book, and may book in me.

Michel de Montaigne

Writers and Writing
16

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

George Orwell

Writers and Writing
17

An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.

Nicolas Chamfort

Writers and Writing
18

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

Writers and Writing
19

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

Writers and Writing
20

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Sigmund Freud

Writers and Writing
21

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Raymond Chandler

Writers and Writing
22

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

James Baldwin

Writers and Writing
23

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Writers and Writing
24

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Mark Twain

Writers and Writing
25

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Salman Rushdie

Writers and Writing
26

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Charlotte Brontë

Writers and Writing
27

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

Samuel Johnson

Writers and Writing
28

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

E. M. Forster

Writers and Writing
29

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Gore Vidal

Writers and Writing
30

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Writers and Writing
31

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

Writers and Writing
32

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

Writers and Writing
33

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Arnold Bennett

Writers and Writing
34

Every author in some degree portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Writers and Writing
35

Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.

Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford

Writers and Writing
36

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Virginia Woolf

Writers and Writing
37

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Jorge Luis Borges

Writers and Writing
38

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Leo Rosten

Writers and Writing
39

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Joseph Brodsky

Writers and Writing
40

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

William James

Writers and Writing
41

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Writers and Writing
42

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

George Orwell

Writers and Writing
43

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Oscar Wilde

Writers and Writing
44

Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!

Herman Melville

Writers and Writing
45

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

George Orwell

Writers and Writing
46

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

Horace

Writers and Writing
47

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Ezra Pound

Writers and Writing
48

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Anita Brookner

Writers and Writing
49

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

W. Somerset Maugham

Writers and Writing
50

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

George Orwell

Writers and Writing
51

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

Henry James

Writers and Writing
52

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

Writers and Writing
53

He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Writers and Writing
54

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Edward Dahlberg

Writers and Writing
55

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Oscar Wilde

Writers and Writing
56

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Wayne Dyer

Writers and Writing
57

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

Henry David Thoreau

Writers and Writing
58

I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.

Molière

Writers and Writing
59

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

Washington Irving

Writers and Writing
60

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Bertrand Russell

Writers and Writing
61

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

D. H. Lawrence

Writers and Writing
62

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

George Eliot

Writers and Writing
63

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Ernest Hemingway

Writers and Writing
64

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

Henry James

Writers and Writing
65

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Samuel Johnson

Writers and Writing
66

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

D. H. Lawrence

Writers and Writing
67

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Peter De Vries

Writers and Writing
68

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Salman Rushdie

Writers and Writing
69

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

William Faulkner

Writers and Writing
70

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Don Marquis

Writers and Writing
71

I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

Marcel Proust

Writers and Writing
72

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

T. S. Eliot

Writers and Writing, Editing and Editors
73

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.

Norman Mailer

Writers and Writing
74

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Robertson Davies

Writers and Writing
75

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Virginia Woolf

Writers and Writing
76

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Luigi Pirandello

Writers and Writing
77

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

H. L. Mencken

Writers and Writing
78

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

William Faulkner

Writers and Writing
79

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Writers and Writing
80

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron

Writers and Writing
81

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Blaise Pascal

Writers and Writing
82

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

William Faulkner

Writers and Writing
83

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Isaac Asimov

Writers and Writing
84

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Quentin Crisp

Writers and Writing
85

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

Writers and Writing
86

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Dorothy Parker

Writers and Writing
87

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

E. B. White

Writers and Writing
88

In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.

Samuel Johnson

Writers and Writing
89

In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron

Writers and Writing
90

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Charles Cooley

Writers and Writing
91

It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

Edward Gibbon

Writers and Writing
92

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

John Ruskin

Writers and Writing
93

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

Jean de La Bruyère

Writers and Writing
94

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

Writers and Writing
95

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

W. Somerset Maugham

Writers and Writing
96

Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.

Charles Caleb Colton

Writers and Writing
97

Let those who would write heroic poems make their life an heroic poem.

John Milton

Writers and Writing
98

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

Writers and Writing
99

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Jorge Luis Borges

Writers and Writing
100

Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

Jean de La Bruyère

Writers and Writing

Showing items 1 - 25 of 232

Famous Quotes About Writers and Writing you can use this list to help make your own ranked list about this topic

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

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

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

All the world knows me in my book, and may book in me.

An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Every author in some degree portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!

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

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

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

I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.

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

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

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

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.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.