A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
—Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian Novelist
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
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
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
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
—Salman Rushdie (b.1947) Indian-born British 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
The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
—Cyril Connolly (1903–74) British Literary Critic, Writer
You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.
—Anatole France (1844–1924) French Novelist
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
—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
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
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
—William Faulkner (1897–1962) American Novelist
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story 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
If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.
—Blaise Pascal (1623–62) French Mathematician, Physicist, Theologian
I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.
—Don Marquis (1878–1937) American Humorist, Journalist, Author
A book should be luminous not voluminous.
—Christian Nestell Bovee (1820–1904) American Writer, Aphorist
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard-by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off.
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) American Poet, Dramatist
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
He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet
In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
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 Writer, Novelist
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.
—William Faulkner (1897–1962) American Novelist
I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922) French Novelist
How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.
—Wayne Dyer (1940–2015) American Self-Help Author
When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (c.4 BCE–65 CE) Roman Stoic Philosopher, Statesman, Tragedian
Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet
Ten censure wrong, for one that writes amiss.
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744) English Poet
I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
—Ken Kesey (1935–2001) American Counterculture Novelist
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