My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
—William Faulkner (1897–1962) American Novelist
I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) American Abolitionist, Author
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
—Anthony Burgess (1917–93) English Novelist, Critic, Composer
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, and defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist
If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!
—Jackie Collins (1937–2015) English Romance Novelist
No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write.
—Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux (1636–1711) French Poet, Satirist, Literary Critic
One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said—the words one didn’t have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one’s dignity or survival.
—Cynthia Ozick (b.1928) American Novelist, Short-story Writer, Essayist
The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
—James Baldwin (1924–87) American Novelist, Social Critic
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
—Charles Caleb Colton (c.1780–1832) English Clergyman, Aphorist
Our work is to present things that are as they are.
—Frederick II of Prussia (1712–86) Prussian Monarch
Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet
For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That’s why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian Dissident Novelist
I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.
—Kate Chopin (1850–1904) American Novelist, Short-Story Writer
The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.
—Unknown
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
—T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) American-born British Poet, Dramatist, Literary Critic
The strokes of the pen need deliberation, as much as those of the sword need swiftness.
—Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) American Feminist, Reformer, Writer
I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.
—Salman Rushdie (b.1947) Indian-born British Novelist
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-born American Novelist
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
—Henry James (1843–1916) American-born British Novelist, Writer
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
Most authors steal their works, or buy.
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744) English Poet
O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Irish Satirist
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
—Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
—Iris Murdoch (1919–99) British Novelist, Playwright, Philosopher
What’s so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.
—Andre Dubus (1936–99) American Short Story Writer, Essayist
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.
—Unknown
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
—W. H. Auden (1907–73) British-born American Poet, Dramatist
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic