Writing Quotes

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

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