Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.
—Jean de La Bruyere (1645–96) French Satiric Moralist, Author
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
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
—W. H. Auden (1907–73) British-born American Poet, Dramatist
To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do.
—Aristotle (384BCE–322BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Scholar
As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.
—Charlotte Bronte (1816–1855) English Novelist, Poet
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
—Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French Writer, Moralist
After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I’d say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you’re walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you’re not vitally interested in.
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet
There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what [a] friend of mine calls “the fleas of life”-you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles and little nuisances of one sort or another.
—William Styron (1925–2006) American Novelist, Essayist, Writer
To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.
—Anne Rice (1941–2021) American Author
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
—Richard Bach (b.1936) American Novelist, Aviator
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
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
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
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
Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.
—Francoise Sagan (1935–2004) French Novelist, Playwright, Short-Story Writer
Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.
—John Steinbeck (1902–68) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Journalist
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences
—Anatole France (1844–1924) French Novelist
If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.
—T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) American-born British Poet, Dramatist, Literary Critic
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. ‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744) English Poet
Why did I write? What sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents , or my own?
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744) English Poet
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
It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
Volume depends precisely on the writer’s having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
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
Writers are the main landmarks of the past.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) British Novelist, Poet, Politician
Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.
—Paul J. Meyer
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
—Alice Walker (b.1944) American Novelist, Activist
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
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
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
—Salman Rushdie (b.1947) Indian-born British Novelist
I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
—V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) Trinidadian-British Novelist, Short-story Writer
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
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
—Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
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 always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.
—Moliere (1622–73) French Playwright
The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.
—Blaise Pascal (1623–62) French Mathematician, Physicist, Theologian
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
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
—Harold Pinter (1930–2008) British Playwright
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
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