Writers Quotes

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

~ Edith Wharton

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

~ Virginia Woolf

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Get black on white.

~ Guy De Maupassant

It is a sobering thought that each of us gives his hearers and his readers a chance to look into the inner working of his mind when he speaks or writes.

~ J. M. Barker

Read over your compositions and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine strike it out.

~ Samuel Johnson

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human and he responds emotionally but at the same time there's this cold observer who cannot cry.

~ Brian Moore

The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book I assure you.

~ Samuel Johnson

The obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity.

~ Quintilian

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.

~ Edna Ferber

Just get it down on paper and then we'll see what to do with it.

~ Maxwell Perkins

Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man write about a man.

~ E. B. White

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words a paragraph no unnecessary sentences for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline but that every word tell.

~ William Strunk

Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons he would lose his angels.

~ Dakin Williams

Self-expression is for babies and seals where it can be charming. A writer's business is to affect the reader.

~ Vincent Mchugh

There is but one art to omit.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win hold or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.

~ John Mason Brown

Write something even if it's just a suicide note.

~ Anonymous

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

~ Roland Barthes

Nature not content with denying him the ability to think has endowed him with the ability to write.

~ A. E. Housman

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.

~ Northrop Frye

When an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

~ Samuel Johnson

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

~ Henry David Thoreau

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

~ Karl Kraus

The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.

~ Samuel Johnson

Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.

~ André Maurois

Every writer without exception is a masochist a sadist a peeping Tom an exhibitionist a narcissist an injustice collector and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity.

~ Edmund Bergler

My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

~ Joyce Carey

Less is more.

~ Robert Browning

We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

~ Henry David Thoreau

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

~ Thomas Wolfe

I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months but you don't earn the fourth without it.

~ Mordecai Richler

John the Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx.

~ Anonymous

Every word she writes is a lie including 'and' and 'the'.

~ Mary Mccarthy

When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do - well that's memoirs.

~ Will Rogers

Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

~ John Hersey

His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness when in fact I am amiable indulgent affectionate shy and rather timid at heart.

~ J. B. Priestley

The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance the farther there is to go and the more there is to say the less time there is to say it.

~ Gabrielle Roy