c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
But 'why then publish?' There are no rewardsOf fame or profit when the world grows weary.I ask in turn why do you play at cards?Why drink? Why read? To make some hour less dreary.It occupies me to turn back regardsOn what I've seen or pondered, sad or cheery,And what I write I cast upon the streamTo swim or sink. I have had at least my dream.
— George Gordon Byron, Don Juan
...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wild Girls
Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never saw anything like it. I can't understand it though. I never write anything but checks myself. ""Bob!" said Mrs. Ray. "You wrote the most wonderful letters to me before we were married. I still have them, a big bundle of them. Every time I clean house I read them over and cry.""Cry, eh?" said Mr. Ray, grinning. "In spite of what your mother says, Betsy, if you have any talent for writing, it comes from family. Her brother Keith was mighty talented, and maybe you are too. Maybe you're going to be a writer."Betsy was silent, agreeably abashed."But if you're going to be a writer," he went on, "you've got to read. Good books. Great books. The classics.
— Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown
I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It's like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don't want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundred books. Why? Because I have with me two hundred vials with one drop of essence in each!
— C. JoyBell C.
...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.
— Stephen King, Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales
It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living
Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!
— Deena Metzger
Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.
— H.G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly
I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.
— Colson Whitehead
An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.
— Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Good writing is always new.
— A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays
A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal.
— Edward Abbey
Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie..
— Geoffrey Hill
He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. 
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.
— Samuel Johnson
Your boss takes a dim view of SEX?
— Vincent H. O'Neil, Death Troupe
At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
(on teaching writing) So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, 'How do I make a living from this?' It's a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well - but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the more relevant questions of 'why am I writing' and 'what am I saying' and 'how do I keep it honest.
— Celine Kiernan
Literature is painting, architecture, and music.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin
Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.
— Sandra Brown
I write to make sense of my life."-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
— John Cheever
If you focus on the humanity of your stories, your characters, then the horror will be stronger, scarier. Without the humanity, the horror becomes nothing more than a tawdry parlor trick. All flash and no magic, and worst of all, no heart.
— Don Roff
it's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft--they just do it
— Alfred Lansing
We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")
— Yevgeny Zamyatin
For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
— Doris Lessing
Let your words be your voice. And let your voice be heard within the hearts of others.
— Anasia Nicole Hixon, In the Midst of It All
In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.
— John Steinbeck
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
— George Orwell
Fill your papers with the breathings of your heart.
— William Wadsworth
Panic strikes me when I think about a sentence that isn’t given the chance to live because I don’t have a pen in my hand or am not sitting near enough to someone familiar to speak it to. Especially if it’s a particularly good sentence, a sentence with truth or beauty or humor or sadness to it. The best ones always take you by surprise. They sneak into your head while you’re walking down the aisles at a supermarket, or flat-out assault you when you’re at your grandmother’s funeral, and you have to scramble to give the thought life before it’s gone forever. Cocktail napkins, palms, text messages sent to yourself.
— Adi Alsaid, Somewhere Over the Sun
The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
— Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Sometimes, when it’s going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.
— David Nicholls, One Day
no one could ever push you to write or become a writer, except yourself.
— Desi Puspitasari
In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words.
— Leo Tolstoy
It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
— Graham Greene
Turning a manuscript into a book is easy getting the manuscript ready to become a book is hard. 
— A.P. Fuchs
You will learn more about writing from one hour of reading than you will in six hours of writing.
— John McAleer
In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.
— Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.
— G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions
The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.
— Paul Di Filippo, How To Write Science Fiction
That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.
— Paul Di Filippo, How To Write Science Fiction
Like many of the kids I write about, I once was a runaway myself—and a few (but not all) of the other writers in the series also come from troubled backgrounds. That early experience influences my fiction, no doubt, but I don't think it's necessary to come from such a background in order to write a good Bordertown tale. To me, "running away to Bordertown" is as much a metaphorical act as an actual one. These tales aren't just for kids who have literally run away from home, but also for every kid, every person, who "runs away" from a difficult or constrictive past to build a different kind of life in some new place. Some of us "run away" to college . . . or we "run away" to a distant city or state . . . or we "run away" from a safe, secure career path to follow our passions or artistic muse. We "run away" from places we don't belong, or from families we have never fit into. We "run away" to find ourselves, or to find others like ourselves, or to find a place where we finally truly belong. And that kind of "running away from home"—the everyday, metaphorical kind—can be just as hard, lonely, and disorienting as crossing the Nevernever to Bordertown . . . particularly when you're in your teens, or early twenties, and your resources (both inner and outer) are still limited. I want to tell stories for young people who are making that journey, or contemplating making that journey. Stories in which friendship, community, and art is the "magic" that lights the way. she "founded")
— Terri Windling
If we are exhorted to play simple melodies with beauty rather than difficult ones with error, the same should be applied to writing; simple words greater effect.
— Sonia Rumzi
Question: You’re 21-years-old, a young adult writing mature adult literary fiction. Imaj: Yes, I feel creativity is an ageless thing.
— Imaj, Harlow
The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin
I was thinking: to write and being a writer are two kind of diferrences things.To write is a please.Being a writer is about taking it as a job, as a consequency, as a responsibility. And being a writer is about ENDLESSLY passion. If you don’t like it, just don’t do it.If you can’t do it, just take it as a please.
— Desi Puspitasari
Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.
— Pico Iyer
Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.
— Ralph Keyes, The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear
Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.
— Ernest Hemingway
But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.
— Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name
Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.
— David Morrell
Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words  if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night  do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match?
— C.J. Cherryh
Nothing so sharpens the thought process as writing down one's arguments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discussion become painfully obvious on the written page.
— Hyman G. Rickover
I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards.
— Garth Marenghi
The act of writing, it seems to me, makes up a shelter, allows space to what would otherwise be hidden, crossed out, mutilated. Sometimes writing can work toward a reparation, making a sheltering space for the mind. Yet it feeds off ruptures, tears in what might otherwise seem a seamless, oppressive fabric.
— Meena Alexander, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience
But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what we do. We are scribes to the ticking of the days, and we have a job to do. We are not at peace unless we are doing it.
— Larry Brooks
The best way to be original is to not copy anyone.
— Sebastyne Young
I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.
— Ha Jin
I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please."The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere."I'm working on it.
— Andrew Sullivan
Be thankful for the people who have stood by you and cheered you on, but don't forget to be thankful for the ones that said it could not be done. Writing a book is no small task and even the skeptics can help you get where you want to be!
— C.K. Webb, Suspense Magazine January 2011
When you're writing what you love, it's the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.
— Don Roff
It never ceases to amaze me how prosaic, pedestrian, unimaginative people can persistently pontificate about classical grammatical structure as though it's fucking rocket science. These must be the same people who hate Picasso, because he couldn't keep the paint inside the lines and the colors never matched the numbers.
— Abbe Diaz
Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.
— Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass 'rules' than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed 'requirement' of a twist ending, going all the way back to H.H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such 'rules'.
— David J. Schow
About writing:The trick is to make sure you love what you've produced--to Believe..in order to convince.
— Christina Westover
There is something about just setting the pen to paper that lifts me and helps to focus my energy and thoughts.
— Susan Elaine Jenkins
I will write one book that will change entire humankind if only you have enough guts to read my previous ones.
— Santosh Kalwar
I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real -- the lives I had read about in books.
— Dorothy Allison, Trash: Stories
Why write wrong if the writing won’t right the wrong? (90)
— Sandra M. Gilbert, Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve
Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.
— Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution
Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.
— M. John Harrison, Things That Never Happen
we do not write as we want but as we can
— W. Somerset Maugham
Everyone whirled around her, entranced by the stories in which they recognized themselves, but in the stories they were also more than themselves and it always felt at the end fulfilled, not meaningless and empty like life can sometimes feel.
— Francesca Lia Block
Humor, drama, romance, whatever genre of entertainment you create or consume is only effective if it is challenging to your sensibilities. When the sexuality of seeing a woman’s ankles became trumped by her calf, society changed. When the calf was later trumped by a woman offering shots of alcohol from her vagina on Rock of Love, society changed again. My hope for this world is that we can soon run out of shocking body parts and can finally see the humor in our ætheric bodies.
— Christy Leigh Stewart
pencils racing across paper, a sound I like." Marisol
— Eileen Granfors, Some Rivers End on the Day of the Dead
@bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.
— Walter Kirn
Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.
— Ted Chiang
I did point out that I have no prophetic gifts. I write books because I tried to do something more useful and failed. Since I've been trained to write, I do that as a defense against total despair. And seeing people like you, who are actively engaged in trying to salvage pieces of our wrecked lives, gives me hope that after all we are not alone.
— Ayi Kwei Armah
Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.
— David Leavitt, Collected Stories
At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth.
— Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1
All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius.
— P.D. James, Talking About Detective Fiction
Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.
— Nick Hornby
There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn't go away is the one to pay attention to.
— Antonya Nelson
I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.
— Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter
If you'd blush saying something in person, don't write it.
— Jonathan Price, Put That in Writing
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
— Sharon O'Brien
It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.
— Don DeLillo
A book is never, ever finished. You simply get to a point where you and your editor are reasonably happy with how it is and you go with that. Left to our own devices, a writer would endlessly fiddle with a book, changing little thing after little thing.
— Kimberly Pauley
My job is to inspire others to live full lives. Whether I do that through my writing or my actions are one in the same.
— Victoria Klein
Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.
— Nicholas Meyer
The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.
— Sōseki Natsume, The Three-Cornered World
Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'dBy your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shadeBelow the garden...His mind's eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship.
— Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp
To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.
— Hélène Cixous
If I woke up one morning and realized that all I ever was going to be was a business man, I'd probably die. All my dreams would be shattered. Early in life I had many dreams. I dreamed of being a great basketball star. I dreamed of being a preacher. I dreamed of saving the world from war and racism. And I dreamed of being a great poet. Today, I dream only of writing.
— Harley King, Mother, Don't Lock Me In That Closet!
If there's a will, there's a way!I feel larger than LIFE--and look up to the stars who shine down on me and have become my own personal cheerleaders....as my fingers tap on my computer late into the night..
— Donna Scrima-Black
The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Despair
Send message to the future by writing it today!
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
Never ever forget that you enlisted in the ranks – you weren’t press ganged or drafted. Nobody owes you anything – least of all respect for your work – until you’ve earned it with what you put on the page.
— T.F. Rigelhof
The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you're not writing well, why continue it? I just don't think this grinding away is useful.
— Edmund White
The hospital bulked darkly in the darkness.
— William T. Vollmann, Poor People
W jakimś sensie takie osoby jak ona, te, które władają piórem, bywają niebezpieczne. Narzuca się od razu podejrzenie fałszu - że taka osoba nie jest sobą, tylko okiem, które bezustannie patrzy, a to, co widzi, zamienia w zdania; w ten sposób okrawa rzeczywistość ze wszystkiego, co w niej najważniejsze, z niewyrażalności.
— Olga Tokarczuk, Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych
I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
I enjoy writing, I enjoy my house, my family and, more than anything I enjoy the feeling of seeing each day used to the full to actually produce something. The end.
— Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years
No, she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say ‘No’ at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up.
— Hilaire Belloc
Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.
— Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
— Howard Nemerov
The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.
— Janet Frame, Janet Frame: An Autobiography
A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust
— Po Bronson
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. ...)
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.
— Brigid Brophy, Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without
It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas. 102
— Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert
How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more.Alone. Alone to the very end. I… every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?
— André Brink, A Dry White Season
Writing is more than a gift. It is a struggle that blesses those who see it through to the end.
— Nona Mae King
Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.
— Georges Bataille
No iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.
— Isaac Babel
I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.
— Edmund White, Forgetting Elena
(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, were the tenements--abandoned, ramshackled. The spaces between the piles were the roads, the alleyways, the footpaths, the rivers. The bridges to other neighborhoods, the bridges out...In this way I could get a sense if one could find their way through the book, if the map I was creating made sense, if it was a place one would want to spend some time in. If one could wander there, if one could get lost.
— Nick Flynn, The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir
A true writer should be able to write about any color. It's the story they tell that should affect people, not the race.
— Dee Dee M. Scott
Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics Peace and Laughter
...at some point you need to stop looking out at others and start looking inward, at yourself, at your own accomplishments, at your own foibles, at your own successes and your own failures. It's only when you begin to look inward that you can begin to have an effect on those out there, the ones with the greedy eyes and outstretched hands.
— Scott F. Falkner
Only write if you can't not.
— Samuel Shem
This story was a story of our time. And a writer's attempts not to fathom his time amount but to sounding his mind in it.
— Louis Zukofsky, Collected Fiction
I think the responsibility of writers is to convey the feelings that exist in the moment, the moment of that sharp and immediate pang of sour smiles when your heart suddenly starts pumping ice through your veins and becomes difficult and visual perception takes on the appearance of cinematographer on Cops, with unsteady frames and jostling scenes, running through a backyard chasing perpetrators.
— Johnny Rico
It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.
— Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia 1910-1960
This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride – somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age.
— Louis Zukofsky, Collected Fiction
When the door to my writing chamber gasps shut and the almost imperceptible sigh of a rose petal falls on my desk, I know that my muse is present.
— Brandi L. Bates
None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelligent layman must expect also to encounter good economists who are difficult writers even though some of the best have been very good writers. He should know, moreover, that at least for a few great men ambiguity of expression has been a positive asset. But with these exceptions he may safely conclude that what is wholly mysterious in economics is not likely to be important.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics Peace and Laughter
Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.
— Thomas Ligotti
I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.
— Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story
I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don't make a writer mad, he'll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail.
— Leon Uris, Mitla Pass
[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.
— Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees
You're writing, you're coasting, and you're thinking, 'This is the best thing I've ever written, and it's coming so easily, and these characters are so great.' You put it aside for whatever reason, and you open it up a week later and the characters have turned to cardboard and the book has completely fallen apart," she says. "That's the moment of truth for every writer: Can I go on from here and make this book into something? I think it separates the writers from the nonwriters. And I think it's the reason a lot of people have that unfinished manuscript around the house, that albatross.
— Jacqueline Woodson
A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader's eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.
— Bill Barich
Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made a mistake of paying the taxi driver with a check made out of toilet paper.
— Janet Frame
Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.
— André Maurois
If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has. 
— Charles Baxter
Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.
— Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees
A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.
— Leon Uris, Mitla Pass
The greatest writers have persistence.
— Gina B. Nahai
No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence.
— Malcolm Cowley
The material's out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in.
— Beverly Lowry
I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people--men and women alike--could go on to happier, more productive lives.
— Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
I have long gone about with a conviction on my mind that I had a work to do—a Work, if you like, with a great W; a Purpose to fulfil; ... a Great Social Evil to Discover and to Remedy.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, The Book of Snobs
I thought about how all that mattered, in all entirety, and all I wanted, and all I could see anything being worth anything for, was being a writer.
— Ariel Schrag, Likewise: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag
I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
— Toni Morrison
(D)ialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. 'When you're writing lines...you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.
— Jincy Willett, The Writing Class
You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.
— A.E. van Vogt
(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college...Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection slip at the age of thirty-five.
— Jincy Willett, The Writing Class
If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void.
— Graham Robb, Rimbaud: A Biography
Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.
— Joseph O'Neill, Netherland
Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.
— John Gregory Dunne
(T)hey were at ease with each other, which was essential to a productive workshop.
— Jincy Willett, The Writing Class
For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
... And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.
— Elizabeth Sims
The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.
— Ivan Klíma
Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.
— N. Scott Momaday
he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.
— Machado de Assis
Put the baby on the paper.
— Barbara O'Connor
Pages and pages and pages with words all over the pages. My goodness, what fun. What fun to write whatever words occur.
— Jonah Winter, Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude
To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as if nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful… everything that happens is of consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for unlimited possibility.
— James P. Carse
While I have the floor, here's a question that's been bothering me for some time. Why do so few writers of heroic or epic fantasy ever deal with the fundamental quandary of their novels . . . that so many of them take place in cultures that are rigid, hierarchical, stratified, and in essence oppressive? What is so appealing about feudalism, that so many free citizens of an educated commonwealth like ours love reading about and picturing life under hereditary lords?, such as flush toilets, movable type, or electricity for every home in the kingdom? Given half a chance, the sons and daughters of peasants would rather not grow up to be servants. It seems bizarre for modern folk to pine for a way of life our ancestors rightfully fought desperately to escape.
— David Brin, Glory Season
Rituals help us change modes.
— Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
I always had plenty of ideas. I didn’t exactly have them. They grew—little by little, a half an idea at a time. First, part of a phrase and then a person to go with it. After a person, then a little corner of a place for the person to be in.
— Carol Emshwiller, Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories
Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
— Julian Barnes
I was reading, absorbed in an assault on K2 by a team of Japanese mountaineers, my lungs constricting in the thin burning air, the deadly sting of wind-lashed ice in my face, when the record -- Le Sacre du Printemps -- caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame.
— T.C. Boyle
This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period.
— Leon Uris
It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.
— Gustave Flaubert
The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.
— Gustave Flaubert
When you travel with your family, you may not get the volume of work done you would if you were alone, but you can still do something while recharging. If nothing else, you can gather your own thoughts, write down ideas, observe people around you, and reflect on experiences. Working doesn't always mean putting words on paper.
— Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Well then – I see two ways of letting things take their course – Create one’s own sensations with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words – not often, mind you – or else neatly draw the angles, the squares, the entire geometry of feelings – those of the moment, naturally.
— Jacques Vaché
The experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful. I just thought, I never want that to happen again.
— Edgar Wright
The novel cannot submit to authority.
— Julian Gough, Juno & Juliet
A sense of mission lostin ink'sjagged outcrops.I was trying to tell myselfwhat I must have knownbeforein a formI wouldn't recognize at first.
— Rae Armantrout, Next Life
Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life's life-story.
— Michael Martone, Michael Martone
Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the “authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?
— André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor
Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg.
— Steven Millhauser