If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
—Isaac Asimov (1920–92) Russian-born American Writer, Scientist
I love writing, it’s the center of my life. If you don’t love what you do, you’d better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don’t have a reason for living.
—Ray Bradbury (b.1920) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
—Pablo Neruda (1904–73) Chilean Poet, Diplomat, Political leader
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.
—Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American Novelist, Human Rights Activist
The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can’t fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.
—Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American Actor, Comedian, Singer
Readers of the twenty-first chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably know or is really a discardable limb. I meant the book to end in this way, but my aesthetic judgment may have been faulty. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics. ‘Quod scripsi scripsi’ said Pontius Pilate when he made Jesus Christ the King of the Jews. ‘What I have written I have Written.’ We can destroy what we have written but we cannot unwrite it. I leave what I wrote with what Dr. Johnson called frigid indifference to the judgment of that .00000001 of the American population which cares about such things. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
—Anthony Burgess (1917–93) English Novelist, Critic, Composer
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
—Andre Gide (1869–1951) French Novelist
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
—Colette (1873–1954) French Novelist, Performer
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.
—William Golding (1911–93) English Novelist
The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.
—Omar Khayyam (1048–1123) Persian Mathematician
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
I wrote a poem to the moon
But no one noticed it;
Although I hoped that late or soon
Someone would praise a bit
Its purity and grace forlone,
Its beauty tulip-cool…
But as my poem died still-born,
I felt a fool.
I wrote a verse of vulgar trend
Spiced with an oath or two;
I tacked a snapper at the end
And called it Dan McGrew.
I spouted it to bar-room boys,
Full fifty years away;
Yet still with rude and ribald noise
It lives today.
‘Tis bitter truth, but there you are-
That’s how a name is made;
Write of a rose, a lark, a star,
You’ll never make the grade.
But write of gutter and of grime,
Of pimp and prostitute,
The multitude will read your rhyme,
And pay to boot.
So what’s the use to burn and bleed
And strive for beauty’s sake?
No one your poetry will read,
Your heart will only break.
But set your song in vulgar pitch,
If rhyme you will not rue,
And make your heroine a bitch…
Like Lady Lou.
—Robert W. Service (1874–1958) Scottish Poet, Author
The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
—Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) American Dancer, Choreographer
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
—J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) English Novelist, Short Story Writer
A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.
—Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) French Novelist, Critic
Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors — somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating — none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.
—James A. Michener (1907–97) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Historian
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
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
Would you not like to try all sorts of lives—one is so very small—but that is the satisfaction of writing—one can impersonate so many people.
—Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand-born British Author
If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!
—Jackie Collins (1937–2015) English Romance Novelist
Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
—Anthony Burgess (1917–93) English Novelist, Critic, Composer
Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.
—Stephen Vizinczey (b.1933) Hungarian-born Canadian Novelist, Literary Critic, Author
Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.
—Santha Rama Rau (1923–2009) Indian-American Travel Writer
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
—Colette (1873–1954) French Novelist, Performer
Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.
—J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) British Scholar, Author
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
—E. M. Forster (1879–1970) English Novelist, Short Story Writer, Essayist
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.
—William Golding (1911–93) English Novelist
The circumstance which gives authors an advantage above all these great masters, is this, that they can multiply their originals; or rather, can make copies of their works, to what number they please, which shall be as valuable as the originals themselves.
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719) English Essayist, Poet, Playwright, Politician
It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
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
In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.
—Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American Sociologist
Ten censure wrong, for one that writes amiss.
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744) English Poet
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
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
—Martin Amis (b.1949) British Novelist, Journalist
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
—Ezra Pound (1885-1972) American Poet, Translator, Critic
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
—Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American Actor, Comedian, Singer
The writer does the most good who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English Clergyman, Essayist, Wit
Every writer “creates” his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
The bee himself did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me, and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy.
—Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911) American Social Reformer, Clergyman
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
—Milan Kundera (b.1929) Czech Novelist
I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, “I will tell you a story,” and then he passes the hat.
—Robertson Davies (1913–95) Canadian Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American Novelist
Can an author with reason complain that he is cramped and shackled if he is not at liberty to publish blasphemy, bawdry, or sedition?; all of which are equally prohibited in the freest governments, if they are wise and well-regulated ones.
—Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) English Statesman, Man of Letters
I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
—V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) Trinidadian-British Novelist, Short-story Writer
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write.
—Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux (1636–1711) French Poet, Satirist, Literary Critic
I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I’m one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.
—Mel Brooks (b.1926) American Film Actor, Screenwriter, Composer, Comedian, Actor
A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer – to be living a kind of double life.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney, Writer
There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: “More money for more work.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) English Occultist, Mystic, Magician
If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
—Karl Marx (1818–1883) German Philosopher, Economist
I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.
—James A. Michener (1907–97) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Historian
It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
—Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American Novelist, Poet
A writer needs three things: experience, observation, and imagination—any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
—William Faulkner (1897–1962) American Novelist
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American Novelist
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.
—Truman Capote (1924–84) American Novelist
Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American Poet
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
—Oliver Herford (1863–1935) American Writer, Artist, Illustrator
I don’t believe in it. All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?
—Philip Pullman (b.1946) English Children’s Author
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.
—E. L. Doctorow (b.1931) American Writer, Editor, Academic
Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.
—Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American Novelist, Human Rights Activist
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.
—William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) English Novelist
Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
—Brian Aldiss (1925–2017) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer
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
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand — a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods — or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
—Willa Cather (1873–1947) American Novelist, Writer
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
—E. L. Doctorow (b.1931) American Writer, Editor, Academic
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
—Italo Calvino (1923–85) Italian Novelist, Essayist, Journalist
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
—Harold Pinter (1930–2008) British Playwright
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
—James A. Michener (1907–97) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Historian
Of course I’m a black writer. I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.
—Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American Novelist, Editor, Academic
If writers were good businessmen, they’d have too much sense to be writers.
—Irvin S. Cobb (1876–1944) American Humorist, Short Story Writer, Columnist
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
—Ray Bradbury (b.1920) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated.
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American Poet, Novelist, Cultural Historian
I have used these weeks to revalue values. Do you understand this expression?. When you come right down to it, the alchemist is the most praiseworthy of men: I mean the one who changes something negligible or contemptible into something of value, even gold. He alone enriches, the others merely exchange. My task is quite singular this time: I have asked myself what mankind has always hated, feared, and despised the most.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German Philosopher, Scholar, Writer
It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
—Edward Gibbon (1737–94) English Historian, Politician
You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
—Ian McEwan British Novelist, Short-Story Writer
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
—James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish Novelist, Poet
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
—William Faulkner (1897–1962) American Novelist
If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you.
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American Humorist, Journalist
The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American Novelist, Playwright
For five months I got up at six o’clock and got dressed by the lamplight. The fire would not yet be on. The house was very cold but I would put on a heavy coat, sit with my feet up to keep them from freezing and with fingers so cramped that I could scarcely hold a pen. I would write my stunt for the day. Sometimes it would be a poem in which I would carol blithely of blue skies and rippling brooks and flowery meads! Then I would thaw out my hands, eat breakfast and go to school. When people say to me, as they occasionally do, ‘Oh how I envy your gift, how I wish I could write as you do’, I am inclined to wonder, with some inward amusement, how much they would have envied me on those dark, cold, winter mornings of my apprenticeship.
—Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) Canadian Novelist
They can’t yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
—Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) British Novelist, Playwright, Critic
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
The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.
—Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) Czech Dramatist, Statesman
Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–91) Polish-born American Children’s Books Writer, Novelist, Short Story Writer
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
—Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American Spy Novelist
Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.
—Charles Caleb Colton (c.1780–1832) English Clergyman, Aphorist
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
—Blaise Pascal (1623–62) French Mathematician, Physicist, Theologian
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
—Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French Philosopher, Psychoanalyst, Poet
The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
—Nelson Algren (1909–81) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-born American Novelist
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking — and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.
—Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) French Novelist, Critic
Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both Rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky.
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-born American Novelist
Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.
—Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) English Novelist, Short Story Writer, Dramatist
Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.
—Ford Madox Ford (1873?1939) English Novelist, Poet, Critic
The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-born American Novelist
When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.
—Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) Italian Dramatist, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Author
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
—Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–72) British Poet, Critic
What I have crossed out I didn’t like. What I haven’t crossed out I’m dissatisfied with.
—Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959) American Film Producer, Film Director, Screenwriter, Actor
The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.
—Edward Gibbon (1737–94) English Historian, Politician
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
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature; only then can he see clearly.
—Julian Barnes (b.1946) British Novelist, Critic
I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides, poisons are neat and clean and really exciting… I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse.
—Agatha Christie (1890–1976) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I’d love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.
—Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) Italian Dramatist, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Author
The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
—E. L. Doctorow (b.1931) American Writer, Editor, Academic
Only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
—Jane Austen (1775–1817) English Novelist
Let me tell you what a writer is. A writer takes comprehensive views, holds large convictions, makes wide generalizations. A writer’s not English, Mexican, or American. A writer’s not a woman nor a man. A writer’s not Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, nor snake worshipper. To local standards of right and wrong a writer’s civilly indifferent. In the virtues, a writer’s concerned only with general expediency. A writer doesn’t waste time focusing on fixed moral principles that aren’t yet before the court of conscience. Happiness discloses itself to a writer as the end and purpose of life, and art and love are the only means to a writer’s happiness. A writer is free of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, and politics. To a writer, a continent doesn’t seem long, nor a century wide. And a writer has ever present consciousness that this is a world of…fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions, and frothing mad.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist
Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest “swell,” but he simply cannot buy the right things.
—William James (1842–1910) American Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician
On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of…. I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.
—A. E. Housman (1859–1936) English Poet, Classical Scholar
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
—Don DeLillo (b.1936) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
—Ken Kesey (1935–2001) American Novelist, Essayist, Short Story Writer
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 (1904–99) American Author, Radio Personality
Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.
—Jean Paul (1763–1825) German Novelist, Humorist
Novels are longer than life.
—Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972) American Playwright, Poet, Novelist
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
—Truman Capote (1924–84) American Novelist
Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I’m a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it’s the same thing.
—Colin Wilson (b.1931) British Philosopher, Novelist