The greatness of all
nations arises from its authors.
— Samuel Johnson
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
Fame often makes a writer vain, but
seldom makes him proud.
— W. H. Auden
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
I think I must write a book. It has been my
cherished dream and I feel an influence that I cannot
resist calling me to the task.
— Charles W..Chesnutt
Among all kinds of
writing, there is none in which authors are more apt to
miscarry than in works of humor,
as there is none in which they are more ambitious to
excel.
— Josaph Addison
Writing is easy. All you do is
stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood
form on your forehead.
— Gene Fowler
Writing books is
certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome,
unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.
— H. L. Mencken
I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for
55.
— Mark Twain
It isn't much of a book of quotations
if I'm not in it.
— Ernie
Zelinski (author of
How to Retire Happy, Wild, and
Free), when given a book of quotations
for his birthday.
Paranoia runs deep in
some authors, possibly because authors are so great at
imagining things that don't exist.
— Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords
You can never be too
paranoid.
—C. E. Crimmins
I write long epigrams,
you yourself write nothing. Yours are shorter.
— Martial (A.D. 40-102)
Ah, yes! I wrote the
"Purple Cow" —
I'm sorry, now, I wrote it!
But I can tell you anyhow,
I'll kill you if you quote it!
— Gelett Burgess
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
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
To read your own
poetry in public is a kind of mental incest.
— Brendan Behan's father
Teaching has ruined more American novelists than
drink.
— Gore Vidal
It's not who you know,
it's who knows you.
— Marcela Landres, former Simon & Schuster
editor
The difference between literature and journalism is
that journalism is unreadable and literature is not
read.
— Oscar Wilde
As publishing has
become less expensive, the urge to write my own self
has become the opportunity to publish my own self.
Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.
— Gabriel Zaid, Book Critic and author of So
Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of
Abundance
Autobiography is the last refuse of scoundrels.
— Henry Gray
With sixty staring me
in the face, I have developed inflammation of the
sentence structure and definite hardening of the
paragraphs.
— James Thurber
Autobiograpy is now as common as adultery and hardly
less reprehensible.
— Lord altrincham
Live never to be
ashamed if anything you do or say is published around
the world — even if what is published is not true.
— from Messiah's Handbook by Richard
Bach
Book reviewers are little old ladies of both
sexes.
— John O'Hara
Books work as an art
form (and an economic one) because they are primarily
the work of an individual.
— Seth Godin, in
Book Content as a Solo Endeavor
The play had only one
fault. It was kind of lousy.
— James Thurber
Write with the learned, pronounce with the
vulgar.
— Benjamin Franklin
I can't
do no literary work for the rest of this year because
I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a
defendant.
— Mark Twain
The only reason for being a professional writer is
that you can't help it.
— Author Unknown
Why do
writers write? Because it isn't there.
— Thomas Berger
I did not intend to write a funny book, at first. I
did not know I was a humorist. I have never been sure
about it. In the middle ages, I should probably
have gone about preaching and got myself burnt or
hanged.
— Jerome K. Jerome
Even the most careful
and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book
they don’t want to read.
— Michael Korda
I'm a lousy writer; a
helluva lot of people have got lousy taste.
— Grace Metalious
History will be kind to me for I intend to write
it.
— Winston Churchill
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 Cottrell, writer
Never judge a book by
its movie.
— J. W. Eagan
It is a mean thief or a successful author that
plunders the dead.
— Austin O'Malley
You could compile the
worst book in the world entirely out of selected
passages from the best writers in the world.
— G. K. Chesterton
Truth is shorter than fiction.
— Irving Cohen
How to Become a Best-Selling
Author:
• Pick a topic you are interested in.
• Think about the topic a lot.
• Think about it some more.
• Develop your own unique theory about what it all
means.
• Just do it — go out and test your theory.
• Write a book about it.
— Roy Williams
The two most engaging
powers of an author are to make new things familiar,
familiar things new.
— William Makepeace Thackeray
What people really want ... is to be broke. At
least, that's one likely interpretation of a new YouGov
poll that shows more people [in Britain] would rather
be a writer than anything else. Now, it's possible
they've all got their eyes on the J. K. Rowling
squillions, but the financial reality is rather more
depressing. Most book manuscripts end up unwanted and
unread on publishers' and agents' slush piles, and the
majority of those that do make it into print sell fewer
than 1,000 copies ... It's not even as if writing is
that glamorous. You sit
alone for hours on end honing your
deathless prose, go days without really talking to
anyone and, if you're lucky, within a year or so you
will have a manuscript that almost no one will want to
read. Your friends and family will come to dread
requests for constructive feedback ...
— John Crace writing in The Guardian
The best time to start
promoting your book is three years before it comes out.
Three years to build a reputation, build a permission
asset, build a blog, build a following, build
credibility and build the connections you'll need
later.
— Seth Godin
Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays
off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking. It
builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing
and idea spreading, working every day to deliver your
message with authority. You should write one.
— Seth Godin
There are three
difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth
publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to
get sensible men to read it.
— C. C. Colton
Write something, even if it's just a suicide
note.
— Unknown
This morning I took
out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.
— Oscar Wilde
In six pages I can't even say "hello."
— James Michener
Write drunk; edit
sober.
— Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway was a
jerk.
— Harold Robbins
Harold Robbins doesn't
sound like an author, he sounds like a company
brochure.
— The New Yorker
Writing is turning one's worst moments into
money.
— J. P. Donleavy
Having your book
turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned
into bouillon cubes.
—John LeCarre
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 Brontë
The award of a pure
gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient
unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.
— Robert Graves
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry.
— Emily Dickinson
A poem need not have a
meaning and like most things in nature often does not
have.
— Wallace Stevens
Writing a book is not hard. It just takes
discipline, and THAT is what’s really hard for some
people. Look: I’m 26, I’ve written four books. It can’t
be that hard. What’s your excuse? 30 minutes a day for
6 months is a lot of content.
— Scott Ginsberg
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his
talent. A reporter can write equally well about
everything that is presented to his view, but a
creative writer can do his best only with what lies
within the range and character of his deepest
sympathies.
— Willa Cather
The relationship of
editor to author is knife to throat.
—Unknown wise person
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work,
or he talks about it more than you want.
— Anatole Broyard
A painter can hang his
pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
—Edward Dahlberg
A blank page is God's
way of showing you how hard it is to be God.
— Unknown wise person
Writing only leads to more writing.
— Colette
What the hell do you
want to work for somebody else for? Work for
yourself!
— Irving Berlin's advice to young songwriter George
Gershwin
I wanted to be an editor or a journalist. I wasn't
really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon
found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep
my magazine going.
— Richard Branson
A big book is a big
bore.
— Callimachus (c. 260 B.C.)
In every fat book
there is a thin book trying to get out.
— Unknown wise reader
There's no thief like
a bad book.
— Italian Proverb
In literature as in love, we are astonished at what
is chosen by others.
— Andre Maurois
Keep writing. Books, articles, pamphlets,
newsletters, blogs, etc. Writing is the foundation of
everything.
— Scott Ginsberg
Never let a domestic quarrel ruin a day's writing.
If you can't start the day fresh, get rid of your
wife.
— One of Mario Puzo's rules for writing a best-selling
novel
Everywhere I go I'm
asked if I think the university stifles writers. My
opinion is that don't stifle enough of them. There's
many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a
good teacher.
— Flannery O'conner
A novel is a piece of prose of a certain length with
something wrong with it.
— Unknown wise nonfiction writer
Great Moments in
Literature: In 1936, Ernest Hemingway, while trout
fishing, caught a carp and decided not to write about
it.
— Guindon cartoon caption
I used to be treated like an idiot, now I'm treated
like an idiot savant.
— Martin Cruz Smith after his novel Gorky Park became a
bestseller
Journalism largely
consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people
who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
— G. K. Chesterton
Every journalist has a
novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
— Russell Lynes
Manuscript: Something submitted in haste and
returned in leisure.
— Oliver Hereford
How to Write While
You Sleep
— Book title by Elizabeth Irwin Ross
published in Cincinatti, OH, by Writers
Digest Books in 1985
"Hello," he lied.
— Don Carpenter quoting a Hollywood agent
It was like passing the scene of a highway accident
and being relieved to learn that nobody had been
seriously injured.
— Martin Cruz Smith on being asked how he liked the
movie version of his novel Gorky Park
Or don't you like to
write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to
keep from working and yet feel you've done
something.
— Ernest Hemingway
Writers have two main problems. One is writer's
block, when the words won't come at all, and the other
is logorrhea, when the words come so fast that
they can hardly get to the wastebasket in time.
— Cecelia Bartholomew
A critic is a man who
knows the way but can't drive the car.
— Kenneth Tynan
Unprovided with original thinking, unformed in the
habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of
composition, I resolved to write a book.
— Edward Gibbon
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
— Paul Valery
Dear Contributor:
Thank you for not sending us anything lately. It suits
our present needs.
— Note from publisher received by Snoopy in Peanuts
cartoon by Charles Schultz.
A Bit of Craziness Is Good for Business
— from Career Success
Without a Real Job
When one has no
particular talent for anything, one takes to the
pen.
— Honoré de Balzac
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It
merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and
literature.
— Oscar Wilde
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except
that there is no other category in which to put it.
— Marianne Moore
For a lesbian bastard
writer mental case, I'm doing awefully well.
— Jill Johnson
William Shakespeare
sounds to me like some kind of faggot.
— Gene Simmons of Kiss
I'm a lousy writer; a helluva lot of people have got
lousy taste.
— Grace Metalious
Do yourself and your
family a favor: Decide right now that you will write a
self-help book someday. I'm serious. A self-help book
is a great way to capture what you think makes a good
person, a good life and a good world. It's also a
"forever document" that you can pass down to future
generations. We need more people sharing positive
messages and books with the world. Why not be one of
those people?
— Brendon Burchard
Many a man thinks he has become famous when he
merely happened to meet an editor who was hard-up for
material.
— Unknown wise person
The learned fool writes
his nonsense in better language than the unlearned but
it is still nonsense.
— Benjamin Franklin
When an honest writer discovers an imposition it is
his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from
its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any
other course would render him unworthy of the public
confidence.
— Mark Twain
Syzygy, inexorable,
pancreatic, phantasmagoria — anyone who can use those
four words in one sentence will never have to do manual
labor.
— W. P. Kinsella
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive
the car.
— Kenneth Tynan
I took a course in speed reading and was able to
read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It's about
Russia.
— Woody Allen
Nothing stinks like a
pile of unpublished writing.
— Sylvia Plath
It would positively be a relief to me to dig
[Shakespeare] up and throw stones at him.
— George Bernard Shaw
[George Bernard] Shaw writes like a Pakistani who
has learned English when he was twelve years old in
order to become an accountant.
— John Osborne
I hate books, for they only teach people to talk
about what they don't understand.
— Jean-Jacques Rosseau
I write for the same reason I breathe —
because if I didn't, I would die.
— Isaac Asimov
Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor
of common people hangs around them.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
— Leo Tolstoy
The reasons so few
good books are written is that so few people who can
write know anything.
— Walter Bagehot
People … have no idea what a hard job it is for two
writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk
about each other’s work.
— Anatole Broyard
I love the look of
books everywhere — in cases, on shelves, and in stacks
on coffee and side tables. They give a room
instant soul and warmth and show you have a curiosity
about the world.
— Miles Redd
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but
also the spirit of his friends.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
To write books is
easy. It requires only pen and ink and the ever-patient
paper.
To print books is a little more difficult, because
genius so often rejoices in illegible handwriting.
To read books is more difficult still, because of the
tendency to go to sleep.
But the most difficult task of all that a mortal man
can embark on is to sell a book.
— Sir Stanley Unwain
There even are places where English completely
disappears.
In America, they haven't used it for years!
Why can't the English teach their children how to
speak?
— Alan Jay Lerner
The writing of more
than 75 poems in any fiscal year should be punishable
by a fine of $500.
— Ed Sanders
Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.
— Oscar Wilde
The books I haven't written are better than the
books other people
have.
— Cyril V. Connolly
It you can't annoy
somebody, there is no point in writing.
— Kingsley Amis
Write out of love,
write out of instinct, write out of reason. But always
for money.
— Louis Untermeyer
