Writers Quotes

When my journal appears many statues must come down.

~ Duke Of Wellington

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

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

~ Georges Simenon

Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.

~ Rabbi Israel Salanter

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

~ J. P. Donleavy

You cannot write in the chimney with charcoal.

~ Russian Proverb

The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.

~ Saul Bellow

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take of care themselves.

~ Lewis Carroll

There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism in a sense to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses their meannesses to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat as it were without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction.

~ Saul Bellow

I can write better than anyone who can write faster and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.

~ A. J. Liebling

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.

~ Northrop Frye

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names identities personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

~ Mel Brooks

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

~ Joan Didion

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

~ Ernest Hemingway

Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.

~ Daphne Du Maurier

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

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

The beginning is easy what happens next is much harder.

~ Anonymous

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

~ Robert Graves

If we try to envisage an 'average Canadian writer' we can see him living near a campus teaching at least part-time at university level mingling too much for his work's good with academics doing as much writing as he can for the CBC and always hoping for a Canada Council Fellowship.

~ George Woodcock

The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth.

~ Henry Miller

For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written ... she is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in them but now they seem hardly to belong to her - and probably she is involved with another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.

~ Rumer Godden

Every author however modest keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

~ Logan Pearsall Smith

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

~ Washington Irving

That's not writing that's typing.

~ Truman Capote

There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis of details. I often say that one must permit oneself and quite advisedly and deliberately a certain margin of misstatement.

~ Benjamin N. Cardozo

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

~ T. S. Eliot

I think with my right hand.

~ Edmund Wilson

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

~ Joseph Stalin

I quote others in order to better express my own self.

~ Michel De Montaigne

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

~ Edith Sitwell

The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.

~ Theodore Isaac Rubin

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself- it is the occurring which is difficult.

~ Stephen Leacock

Writing when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

~ Laurence Sterne

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

Caesar had perished from the world of men Had not his sword been rescued by his pen.

~ Henry Vaughan

Every great and original writer in proportion as he is great and original must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

~ William Wordsworth

Writers write to influence their readers their preachers their auditors but always at bottom to be more themselves.

~ Aldous Huxley

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson