Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"If you're writing a book that takes place in New York in the moment, you can't not write about 9-11; you can't not integrate it. My main character's view is the Statue of Liberty and the Trade Center. It doesn't have to take over, but it has to be acknowledged"

Richard Price, Writer

Richard Price

"I write because I can't imagine not writing"

Richard Price, Writer

Richard Price

"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting"

Henry James, Writer

Henry James

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature"

Henry James, Writer

Henry James

"The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master"

Henry James, Writer

Henry James

"Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poet

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it"

Toni Morrison, Novelist

Toni Morrison

"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it"

Toni Morrison, Novelist

Toni Morrison

"If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it"

Toni Morrison, Novelist

Toni Morrison

"If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it"

Toni Morrison, Novelist

Toni Morrison

"I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway"

Toni Morrison, Novelist

Toni Morrison

"The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book!"

Toni Morrison, Novelist

Toni Morrison

"I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it"

Toni Morrison, Novelist

Toni Morrison

"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, Novelist

Toni Morrison

"Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form"

Toni Morrison, Novelist

Toni Morrison

"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power"

Toni Morrison, Novelist

Toni Morrison

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say"

Anais Nin, Author

Anais Nin

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it"

Anais Nin, Author

Anais Nin

"The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps is what makes him different from others"

Leo Rosten, Novelist

Leo Rosten

"The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it"

Leo Rosten, Novelist

Leo Rosten

"Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented"

Leo Rosten, Novelist

Leo Rosten

"My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything"

Susan Sontag, Author

Susan Sontag

"Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable"

E. M. Forster, Novelist

E. M. Forster

"Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent"

E. M. Forster, Novelist

E. M. Forster

"Television has raised writing to a new low"

Samuel Goldwyn, Producer

Samuel Goldwyn

"Here I am paying big money to you writers, and what for? All you do is change the words"

Samuel Goldwyn, Producer

Samuel Goldwyn

"Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators"

Olin Miller, Writer

Olin Miller

"Memoirs are the backstairs of history"

George Meredith, Novelist

George Meredith

"Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else"

Gloria Steinem, Activist

Gloria Steinem

"Be able to describe anything visual, such as a street scene, in words that convey your meaning"

Marilyn vos Savant, Author

Marilyn vos Savant

"The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty"

John Steinbeck, Author

John Steinbeck

"In utter loneliness, a writer tries to explain the inexplicable"

John Steinbeck, Author

John Steinbeck

"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature"

John Steinbeck, Author

John Steinbeck

"I have owed you this letter for a very long time--but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool"

John Steinbeck, Author

John Steinbeck

"I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether"

Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician

Alfred North Whitehead

"Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom"

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist

John Kenneth Galbraith

"The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written"

Jerome Lawrence, Playwright

Jerome Lawrence

"The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control"

Jerome Lawrence, Playwright

Jerome Lawrence

"In no instance is there to be a musical or opera of Inherit the Wind because it doesn't sing. It's an intellectual play"

Jerome Lawrence, Playwright

Jerome Lawrence

"I think enthusiasm is the answer to passionate writing"

Jerome Lawrence, Playwright

Jerome Lawrence

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