Richard Bach with this book does two things. He gives meFlight. He makes me Young. For both I am deeply grateful.
—Ray Bradbury (b.1920) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.
—Cyril Connolly (1903–74) British Literary Critic, Writer
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
—William Styron (1925–2006) American Novelist, Essayist, Writer
I don’t like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you’re described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.
—Walker Percy (1916–90) American Novelist
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.
—Elie Wiesel (b.1928) Romanian-born American Writer, Professor, Political Activist
It’s hard enough to write a good drama, it’s much harder to write a good comedy, and it’s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
—Jack Lemmon (1925–2001) American Actor, Musician
Footnotes—little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
—William James (1842–1910) American Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician
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
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I’m out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That’s what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers
—Philip K. Dick (1928–82) American Novelist, Essayist, Short Story Writer
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) British Novelist, Poet, Politician
I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
—V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) Trinidadian-British Novelist, Short-story Writer
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.
—Indian Proverb
No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write.
—Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux (1636–1711) French Poet, Satirist, Literary Critic
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks if I knew he could hear me. Praised may he be for not creating me a cotton merchant, a vaudevillian, or a wit.
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) French Novelist, Playwright, Short Story Writer
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
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
It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
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
We turn first ter the bleedin’ parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare collocated by Guvnor Cruickshank ter make manifest Massinger’s indebtedness. I’ll get out me spoons. One of the surest of tests is the way in wich a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets nick; bad poets deface wot they take, and right good poets make it into sumfink better, or at least sumfink different. The bloody right good poet welds ‘is theft into a ‘oole of feelin’ wich is unique, right, utterly different from that from wich it were torn; the bad poet frows it into sumfink wich ‘as no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from auffors remote in time, or alien in ‘am sandwich, right, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The bleedin’ two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from ‘im; ‘e is too close ter ffem ter be of use ter ffem in this way. Massinger, as Guvnor Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a right good deal.
—C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) Irish-born British Academic, Author, Literary Scholar
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
As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) German Philosopher, Physicist
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 serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all humbug.
—Cyril Connolly (1903–74) British Literary Critic, Writer
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
I think what I love most about writing is that feeling that you really nailed something. I rarely feel it with a whole piece, but sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.
—Andre Dubus (1936–99) American Short Story Writer, Essayist
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
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
—James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish Novelist, Poet
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
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
—Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American Writer, Publisher, Artist, Philosopher
I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that’s the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
—Milan Kundera (b.1929) Czech Novelist
In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.
—E. B. White (1985–99) American Essayist, Humorist
You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.
—Larry McMurtry (b.1936) American Novelist, Screenwriter
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
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
—William Faulkner (1897–1962) American Novelist
All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) American Novelist
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
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
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
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
—Ezra Pound (1885-1972) American Poet, Translator, Critic
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
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
—James Thurber
I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea, voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being truth itself, is one—one for all men and for all occupations.
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-born British Novelist
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
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
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.
—William Faulkner (1897–1962) American Novelist