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
A born writer is born scrofulous; his career is an accident dictated by physical or circumstantial disabilities.
—Dylan Thomas (1914–53) Welsh Poet, Author
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
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
—James Baldwin (1924–87) American Novelist, Social Critic
Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Poet
I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.
—Moliere (1622–73) French Playwright
Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
—E. L. Doctorow (b.1931) American Writer, Editor, Academic
I think it’s bad to talk about one’s present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
—Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
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
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
—Richard Bach (b.1936) American Novelist, Aviator
I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
—Walter Benjamin
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 (1936–2021) American Novelist, Screenwriter
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
—William Faulkner (1897–1962) American Novelist
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
—Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
Make em laugh; make em cry; make em wait.
—Charles Reade (1814–84) English Novelist, Playwright
If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.
—Blaise Pascal (1623–62) French Mathematician, Physicist, Theologian
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
—William Zinsser (1922–2015) American Writer, Editor, Literary Critic, Teacher
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive.
—Salman Rushdie (b.1947) Indian-born British Novelist
You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed
—Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.
—Unknown
The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
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
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 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
I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.
—T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) American-born British Poet, Dramatist, Literary Critic
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