I know that we are ignorant and lack artistic talent
but is this any reason to give up on our self-help
book? That crackpot Ernie
Zelinski has written several.
— Cartoon caption in
How to Retire Happy, Wild, and
Free (over 125,000 copies sold
and published in 9 languages)
There is probably no
hell for authors in the next world — they suffer so
much from critics and publishers in this.
— C. N. Bovee
Every writer I know
has trouble writing.
— Joseph Heller
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and
this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would
never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't
require any.
— Russell Baker
If you want to be a
writer — stop talking about it and sit down and
write!
— Jackie Collings
Write drunk; edit sober.
— Ernest Hemingway
I'm a lousy writer; a helluva lot of people have got
lousy taste.
— Grace Metalious
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind
and I like to write standing up.
— Ernest Hemingway
An editor should have a pimp for a brother so
he'd have someone to
look up to.
— Gene Fowler (Writer)
How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once
shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a
publisher. But we remember with charity that his
intentions were good.
— Mark Twain
When I had got my notes all written out I thought
I'd polish it off in two summers, but it took me
twenty-seven years.
— Arnold Toynbee
The three great essentials to achieving anything
worthwhile are; first, hard work, second,
stick-to-it-iveness, and third, common sense.
— Thomas Edison
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent
for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that
time I was too famous.
— Robert Benchley
Nice guys can't
write.
— Knox Burger (Literary Agent)
I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back
on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid
opening the door to it, I won't even reach for a
pencil.
— Richard Bach, author of several best-selling books,
including Illusions
It isn't much of a book of retirement
quotations if I'm not in
it.
— Ernie
Zelinski, author of
The Joy of Not
Working (over
250,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)
Nothing stinks like a
pile of unpublished writing.
— Sylvia Plath
Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's
life.
— James Norman Hall
An author values a compliment even when it comes
from a source of
doubtful competency.
— Mark Twain
A professional writer
is an amateur who didn't quit.
— Richard Bach
When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply,
simply drop it.
— Vauvenargues
Always remember that
if editors were so damned smart, they would know how to
dress.
— Dave Barry
Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant
occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening.
Many authors go crazy.
— H. L. Mencken
Writing is a profession in which you have to keep
proving your talent to people who have none.
— Jules Renard
Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor
of common people hangs around them.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
— Leo Tolstoy
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled,
built, or invented except literally to get out of
hell.
— Antonin Artaud
I hate books, for they only teach people to talk
about what they don't understand.
— Jean-Jacques Rosseau
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the
other one.
— Baltasar Gracián
Writers may be
disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late
to bloom, but they dare to go it alone.
— John Updike
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank
sheet of paper until
drops of blood form on your forehead.
— Gene Fowler
The books I haven't written are better than the
books other people
have.
— Cyril V. Connolly
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind
and I like to write standing up.
— Ernest Hemingway
I read my own books
sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write and then
I remember that it was always difficult and how nearly
impossible it was sometimes .
— Ernest Hemingway
A writer should get as much education as possible,
but just going
to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of
doctorates would
be inspired writers.
— Gwendolyn Brooks, US poet
Writing comes more easily if you have something to
say.
— Sholem Asch
All my best thoughts were stolen by the
ancients.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There's no greater bliss in life than when the
plumber eventually comes to unlock your drains. No
writer can give that sort of pleasure.
— Victoria Glendinning
Writing became such a process of discovery that I
couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted
to know what I was going to say.
— Sharon O'Brien
I can’t do any more
writing because I’m contemplating a gigantic lawsuit
and looking around for a defendant.
— Mark Twain
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the
paperwork.
— Peter De Vries
The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
"An author is a fool who, not content with boring
those he lives with,
insists on boring future generations."
— Charles de Montesquieu (1869-1755)
I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
— Elmore Leonard
A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best
ingredients and having someone sit on it.
— Danielle Steel
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down
at a typewriter and open a vein.
— Walter Wellesley
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot
destroy you.
— Ray Bradbury
Aggression, the writer's main source of energy.
— Ted Solotaroff
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 businessman.
— Sinclair Lewis
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the
realization that he has come upon the right word.
— Catherine Drinker Bowen
America is no place
for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper,
an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog
enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter,
or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.
— Henry Miller
Some writers take to drink, others take to
audiences.
— Gore Vidal
There never was a good biography of a good novelist.
There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any
good.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them
oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. .
. . Writers are really people who write books not
because they are poor, but because they are
dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do
not like.
— Walter Benjamin
A genius can never expect to have a good time
anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is
about the last place in which life will be endurable at
all for an inspired writer of any kind.
— Samuel Butler
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn,
the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you
must say that you are.
— Gore Vidal
Given that external reality is a fiction, the
writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need
to invent the fiction because it is already there.
— J. G. Ballard
A great writer creates a world of his own and his
readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may
entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch
them filing out.
— Cyril Connolly
A man writes to throw off the poison which he has
accumulated because of his false way of life. He is
trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds
in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a
virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word
down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he
believed in.
— Henry Miller
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
An author who speaks about his own books is almost
as bad as a mother who talks about her own
children.
— Benjamin Disraeli
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into
which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy
against the cultivation of his talent.
— James Baldwin
You must not suppose,
because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to
earn an honest living.
— George Bernard Shaw
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western
society.
— Octavio Paz
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever
becomes a master.
— Ernest Hemingway
Good authors, too, who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose . . .
Anything goes.
— Cole Porter
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of
his life, every quality of his mind is written large in
his works.
— Virginia Woolf
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
Great writers are the saints for the godless.
— Anita Brookner
I believe that it is my job not only to write books
but to have them published. A book is like a child. You
have to defend the life of a child.
— George Konrád
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
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is
himself in love with his theme.
— Henry James
I'm the kind of writer
that people think other people are reading.
— V. S. Naipaul
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a
man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and
quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth,
and which exists to see and state things so, and not
otherwise.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise
writer . . . writes for the youth of his own
generation, the critics of the next, and the
schoolmasters of ever afterward.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I
write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself
induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment
I have nothing to say.
— C. C. Colton
The writer is either a
practising recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one;
or both. Usually both.
— Susan Sontag
The shelf life of the
modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk
and the yoghurt.
— John Mortimer
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make
a writer.
G. C. Lichtenberg
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of
lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything
except language.
— Oscar Wilde writing about author George Meredith.
It's very hard to be a
gentleman and a writer.
— W. Somerset Maugham
