Writers Quotes

Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer when he tried to write of some particular day he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense but that ability is at the bottom of writing I am sure.

~ Maxwell Perkins

I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.

~ Maxwell Perkins

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

~ Maxwell Perkins

A memorandum is written to protect the writer - not to inform his reader.

~ Dean Acheson

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers dear Readers are an afterthought.

~ Gertrude Stein

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

~ George Orwell

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

~ Hugh Maclennan

You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you there of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right But where's the bloody horse?

~ Roy Campbell

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must seem to be inevitable.

~ Raymond Chandler

On the trail of another man the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.

~ Paul Murray Kendall

The editorial job has become unlike the ancient age when one judged what one read a job of making judgements on outlines ideas reputations previous books scenarios treatments talk and promises.

~ Sam Vaughan

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.

~ T. S. Eliot

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

~ Laurence Clark Powell

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.

~ Hilaire Belloc

How can you write if you can't cry?

~ Ring Lardner

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

As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.

~ Virginia Woolf

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

~ Ezra Pound

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

~ Gene Fowler

Your manuscript is both good and original but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good.

~ Samuel Johnson

All writers have their own pet commandments.

~ Darin Strauss

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

~ Octavio Paz