Writers Quotes

It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.

~ Nicola Chiaromonte

When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.

~ Blaise Pascal

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

~ William James

I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.

~ Malcolm Lowry

As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground.

~ Henry David Thoreau

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

~ Samuel Johnson

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.

~ Jonathan Swift

They're fancy talkers about themselves writers. If I had to give young writers advice I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

~ Lillian Hellman

The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.

~ Ethel Wilson

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

~ Mark Twain

He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.

~ Irving Howe

There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths and the lesser ones who can only give you themselves.

~ Clifton Fadiman

My own experience is that once a story has been written one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If in the first chapter you say there is a gun hanging on the wall you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.

~ Anton Chekhov

(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

~ Mary Heaton Worse

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

~ Saul Bellow

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

~ Sholem Asch

I've put my genius into my life I've only put my talent into my works.

~ Oscar Wilde

Fundamentally all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying about the brief flicker of time we have here and the frustrations that it creates.

~ Mordecai Richler

I am what libraries and librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.

~ B. K. Sandwell

Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.

~ Saul Bellow

If you would be a reader read if a writer write.

~ Epictetus

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language trying to get human feelings right.

~ John K. Hutchens

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

~ E. M. Forster

Please never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.

~ Alexander Pushkin

The waste basket is a writer's best friend.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.

~ Hilaire Belloc

If a man means his writing seriously he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

~ John Ciardi

Words and sentences are subjects of revision paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.

~ Barrett Wendell

There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.

~ J. Middleton Murry

The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.

~ Robertson Davies

Now as through this world I ramble I see lots of funny men Some rob you with a six gun Some with a fountain pen.

~ Woody Guthrie

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.

~ Anaïs Nin

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

~ Virginia Woolf

Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.

~ Cyril Connolly

I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.

~ Charles Baudelaire

Writing has power but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind but they can't direct it. Time changes things God changes things the dictators change things but writers can't change anything.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

A good writer is basically a story-teller not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer