The greatness of all nations arises from its authors.
— Samuel Johnson
Whenever I am asked what kind of writing is the most lucrative, I have to say, a ransom note.
— H. N. Swanson
Writing is the hardest way to earn a living, with the possible
exception of wrestling alligators.
— Olin Miller
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 profession of book writing makes horseracing seem like a solid, stable
business.
— John Steinbeck
I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may
have as a writer
if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them,
whenever, and if ever, they happen to strike me.
— E. B. White
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
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of
both life and literature.
— Oscar Wilde
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
— John Steinbeck
When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as
Catch-22, I'm tempted to reply, "Who has?"
— Joseph Heller (Author of Catch 22)
Book writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Anyone who decides to write a book must expect to invest a
lot of time and effort
without any guarantee of success. Books do not write themselves and they do not sell themselves. Authors
write and promote their
books.
— Dan Poynter
I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars,
restaurant tables, and loveseats. I have never seen one of
them in print. Books must be written, not talked.
— Morris L. West
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 first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the
easiest person to fool.
— Richard Feynman
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
— Norman Mailer
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
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
— Joseph Heller
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
I do my best writing between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.. Almost every friend I
have who is a consistently productive writer, does their best writing between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. My quota
is two crappy pages per day. I keep it really low so I'm not so intimidated that I never get started. I
will do the gathering of interviews and research throughout the day. I'll get all my notes and materials
together and then I'll do the synthesis between 10 p.m. to bed, which is usually 4 or 5 a.m.
— Tim
Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek
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
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
