Writers Quotes

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them

~ William H. Gass

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.

~ Jules De Goncourt

The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

~ Julian Barnes

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

~ Charles Nodier

The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Don't be indifferent about any random idea that occurs to you, because each and every idea is for a particular purpose. it may not be beneficial to you, but can be what others are craving for

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

~ Niall Williams

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.

~ Piers Anthony

He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me.

~ Coco J. Ginger

He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot had become derailed. He was unable to see his way through the smoke and coke dust of a mythical railway track that should stretch ahead. Yes, the characters were there, good and solid. Indeed, the story's engine was strong and had shunted yet forward and forward, with only one or two sharp halts. But six weeks ago he met the bumpers. R. was now stuck in a deserted station, his progress blocked. (Out Back)

~ Garry Douglas Kilworth

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

~ Margaret Jean Langstaff

Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us.

~ Shannon L. Alder

We need writers who fear nothing. (Our Goal)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.

~ Ralph Keyes

But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what we do. We are scribes to the ticking of the days, and we have a job to do. We are not at peace unless we are doing it.

~ Larry Brooks

Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth.

~ Richard Matheson

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.

~ Georges Bataille

...at some point you need to stop looking out at others and start looking inward, at yourself, at your own accomplishments, at your own foibles, at your own successes and your own failures. It's only when you begin to look inward that you can begin to have an effect on those out there, the ones with the greedy eyes and outstretched hands.

~ Scott F. Falkner

This story was a story of our time. And a writer's attempts not to fathom his time amount but to sounding his mind in it.

~ Louis Zukofsky

This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride – somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age.

~ Louis Zukofsky

I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

I have long gone about with a conviction on my mind that I had a work to do—a Work, if you like, with a great W; a Purpose to fulfil; ... a Great Social Evil to Discover and to Remedy.

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

I thought about how all that mattered, in all entirety, and all I wanted, and all I could see anything being worth anything for, was being a writer.

~ Ariel Schrag

..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

~ Ivan Klíma

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.

~ Machado De Assis

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

~ Julian Barnes

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.

~ Gustave Flaubert

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the “authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?

~ André Breton

What I've learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Always choose love over fear.

~ A.d. Posey

We are the thoughts we choose to keep.

~ A.d. Posey

[A] writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition, and regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded, absurdly cautious approach to his work, which would end up stifling his latent genius.

~ Félix J. Palma

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

~ E.b. White

...writing surrounds us: it's not something we do just in school or on the job but something that is as familiar and everyday as a pair of worn sneakers or the air we breathe.

~ Andrea A. Lunsford

Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author’s intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies don’t make sense when they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, ‘Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?’. Monet would be ripping his hair out.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

~ George Orwell

Publication is a marathon, not a sprint. Writing the book is only the start.

~ Jo Linsdell

Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

~ Mary O'hara

Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.

~ Aljean Harmetz