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Quotes from Writers  

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'Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him to the public.'

Winston Churchill

'Publishing is a very mysterious business.  It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.'

Thomas Wolfe

'Nobody asks you to do this.  The world out there is not panting after another novelist.  We choose it.'

Paul Auster, quoted in an interview with his wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt

'Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.'

Lucy Ellman

'Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.'

Oliver Goldsmith

'Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.'

Hermann Hesse

'The way British publishing works is that you go from not being published no matter how good you are, to being published no matter how bad you are.'

Tibor Fischer

'If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot...reading is the creative center of a writer's life...you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.'

Stephen King

'Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.' 

W B Yeats
 

'To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.'

William Shakespeare

'A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.'

Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point

‘But those who cannot write, and those who can,

All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble, to a man.’

Alexander Pope

'Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.'

Gustave Flaubert

'Literature, with a capital L, unless preserved by Time, has always been in a bad way, but books considered as merchandise have not.'

Denys Val Baker in The Author

'I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice.  The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.'

Anton Chekhov

'The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.'

J W Goethe

‘There’s a lot of tasteful writing out there – nice, tidy, clean – but sometimes it’s excess, rawness and the unpolished that work.’

Dan Vyleta, author of Pavel & I
 

'An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.'

Francois-Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand

'I dislike modern memoirs.  They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.'

Oscar Wilde

'Oh it is only a novel...  In short, 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

‘I don’t believe in writers’ block.  Plumbers don’t get plumbers’ block.  Why should writing be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working.’

Philip Pullman

'Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed?  Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.'

Dorothy Parker

'Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling and good expression; it is having wit, soul and taste, all together.'

George-Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon

'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

‘A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.’

W H Auden, discussing literary biography

'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

'Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.'

Gunter Grass

'Writing is not a job description. A great deal of it is luck. Don't do it if you are not a gambler because a lot of people devote many years of their lives to it (for little reward). I think people become writers because they are compulsive wordsmiths.'

Margaret Atwood in The Times
 

'I have nothing to declare except my genius.'

Oscar Wilde, on passing through the New York Customs House

'When you read a book, you're totally lost in your own private world, and society says that's a good and a wonderful thing. But if you play a game by yourself, it's this weird, fucked-up socially damaging activity.'

Douglas Coupland
 

'Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.'

T S Eliot

 ‘I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.'

Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet

'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.'

E L Doctorow
 

'There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.'

Anthony Trollope

'The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story.'

John le Carre

'Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead - from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.'

Charles Kingsley

'Contrary to what many of you may imagine, a career in letters is not without its drawbacks - chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to sit down and write.'

Fran Lebowitz

'I am inclined t think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.'

Joyce Carol Oates

'I've always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and put words together.'

Robert Harris, whose new political novel The Ghost is causing a furore.
 

'I used to think all poets were Byronic.
They’re mostly wicked as a ginless tonic’

Wendy Cope from Triolet

'What we want above all things is not more books, not more publishers, not more education, not more literary genius, but simply and prosaically more shops.'

George Bernard Shaw

'In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.'

Geoffrey Cotterell in the New York Journal

‘Most writers need to write.  I write for money, really.  If I won the lottery, I would never write another word.  I would rather read.’

Clarissa Dickson Wright, cookery writer

'Truth is always duller than fiction.'

Piers Paul Read

‘Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.’

Andre Jute

'Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.'

Groucho Marx

'The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.'

Samuel Johnson

'Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.'

Katherine Mansfield

'Pedestrian writing, thin characters-I can handle the criticism. I write to pedestrians. And I am a pedestrian. I write the best I can. I know I'm never going to be revered as some classic writer. I don't claim to be C. S. Lewis. The literary-type writers, I admire them. I wish I was smart enough to write a book that's hard to read, you know?'

Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the Left Behind series

'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

'You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you've got something to say.'

F Scott Fitzgerald

‘An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences.’

Rafael Sabatini
 

'What's the product that is imbued with the most value, and the most meaning, and is the most important thing in the world?  And without a doubt, that is books.'

Emma Barnes, MD of Snowbooks

'Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money from and fame from this state of being.'

A A Milne

‘Ever tried.  Ever failed.  No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

Samuel Beckett

'There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.'

Robertson Davies
 

'Just because you go somewhere it doesn't mean you have a peculiar or vivid or insightful take on the place.  Any story takes place in the landscape of the imagination.'

Stef Penney on her refusal to visit the northern Ontario location for her Costa-winning novel, The Tenderness of Wolves.

'The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.'

John Steinbeck

'The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.'

Anthony Trollope in Barchester Towers

'I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.'

Philip Larkin

'Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.'

P D James

'A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.'

Zadie Smith in the Guardian
 

'The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.'

Oscar Wilde

'No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.'

Charles Dickens

'In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man.'

Sinclair Lewis

'The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you.'

Somerset Maugham

'Most people won't realise that writing is a craft.  You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.'

Katherine Ann Porter

'I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an airhole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.'

Cyril Connolly in his Journal

'Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.'

Salman Rushdie

'Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.'

Julie Burchill

'Writers don't need love; all they require is money.'

John Osborne

'Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.'

Iris Murdoch

'What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!'

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jnr

'I have no problem with chick lit.  I love Bridget Jones's Diary, it's just great. It's all the muck in the middle I mind.  I hate anything that's middle brow.  Let us have art and let us have entertainment.'

Jeanette Winterson in The Times

'Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.'

T S Eliot

'Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.'

Ian McEwan

'Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.'

Philip Larkin

'That was the chief difference between literature and life.  In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.'

Aldous Huxley

'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.'

Virginia Woolf

'Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.'

Paul Auster

'The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.'

Blaise Pascal

'If a publisher declines your manuscript, remember it is merely the decision of one fallible human being, and try another.'

Sir Stanley Unwin

'The more you say, the less people remember.  the fewer the words, the greater the profit.'

Francois Fenelon

'Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.'

Ernest Hemingway

'Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.'

The Bible: Ecclesiastes

'Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.'

Robert Louis Stevenson

 'Unfortunately many young writers are more concerned with fame than with their own work... It's much more important to write than to be written about.'

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

'Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.'

Cyril Connolly

'My relatives say that they are glad I'm rich, but that they simply cannot read me.'

Kurt Vonnegut

'Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say.'

Francoise Sagan

'Coleridge was a drug addict.  Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was stabbed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire; then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer -and if so, why?

Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House

'We tell ourselves stories in order to live' 

Joan Didion

'All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.  Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.'

George Orwell in England, Your England

'Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know.'

John Keats, in a letter to Fanny Keats

'I suppose in the world of publication 40 million buyers cannot be wrong.'

Mr Justice Peter Smith, comprehensively dismissing Baigent and Leigh's case that Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code had infringed their copyright in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. (The authors are now taking their case to the Court of Appeal.)

'Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,, and some few to be chewed and digested.'

Francis Bacon in his Essays of 1625

'As regards plot I find real life no help at all.  Real life seems to have no plots.  And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.'

Ivy Compton-Burnett

'Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.'

J B Priestley

'The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim.  It is the sublimest activity of the human mind.  It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.'

Somerset Maugham

'Every author's fairy godmother should provide him not only with a pen but also with a blue pencil.'

F L Lucas in Style

'If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.'

Mordecai Richler

‘I have read everything on the shortlist and I know its quality is incredible. Every writer has aspects of style I genuinely covet. They are extraordinary women and extraordinary writers.’

Zadie Smith, winner of this year’s Orange Prize for On Beauty

'Don't ever get to feeling important about yourself... an editor can only get as much out of an author as the author has in him.'

Maxwell Perkins, speaking to editors

'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.'

Logan Pearsall Smith

'All books are either dreams or swords.  You can cut, or you can drug, with words.'

Amy Lowell

'I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.'

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

'When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside.  It isn't like that at all.  It may be more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there's a great, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent.'

Alan Garner, writing in 1987

‘The blog is certainly another tool for writers out there to break their way in.  But being a blogger does not make you a great writer.'

Julie Powell, who has just won the Blooker for Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/

‘Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world.  Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity.  For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.’

Jeanette Winterson

'There is no measure or limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of lucre and gain.'

Martin Luther

'I am taxed with being a plagiarist, when I am least conscious of being one; but I am not very scrupulous, I own, when I have a good idea, how I came into possession of it.'

Lord Byron

'A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face.... It is one of the few havens remaining where [your] mind can get both provocation and privacy.'

Edward P. Morgan

'When people, women included, hear that you are writing, they assume that it is simply a hobby to fill in the time between doing the washing-up and the ironing. It couldn't possibly be a profession.'

Rachel Billington

'Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.'

Ernest Hemingway

'Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!'

Jane Smiley

'I simply don't know how anyone can write at great speed, and only for the money's sake.'

Feodor Dostoevsky

Asked if editors were no more than failed writers: 'Perhaps - but so are most writers.'

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