Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies"

William Faulkner, Novelist

William Faulkner

"Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, to get the book written"

William Faulkner, Novelist

William Faulkner

"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid"

William Faulkner, Novelist

William Faulkner

"About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment"

Josh Billings, Comedian

Josh Billings

"James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized"

Tom Stoppard, Dramatist

Tom Stoppard

"I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon"

Tom Stoppard, Dramatist

Tom Stoppard

"Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy"

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath"

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"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

"Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease"

Charles Caleb Colton, Writer

Charles Caleb Colton

"Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them"

Charles Caleb Colton, Writer

Charles Caleb Colton

"To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author"

Charles Caleb Colton, Writer

Charles Caleb Colton

"Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience"

Dale Carnegie, Writer

Dale Carnegie

"Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote"

William Hazlitt, Critic

William Hazlitt

"It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir"

Henry Miller, Writer

Henry Miller

"The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary"

Henry Miller, Writer

Henry Miller

"Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern"

Henry Miller, Writer

Henry Miller

"Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon"

Edsger Dijkstra, Scientist

Edsger Dijkstra

"It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are"

Alice Walker, Author

Alice Walker

"Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual"

Jorge Luis Borges, Poet

Jorge Luis Borges

"Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned"

Jorge Luis Borges, Poet

Jorge Luis Borges

"Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean"

Mason Cooley, Writer

Mason Cooley

"Kafka: Cries of Helplessness in Twenty Powerful Volumes"

Mason Cooley, Writer

Mason Cooley

"The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul"

Mason Cooley, Writer

Mason Cooley

"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

"The subject of a good tragedy must not be realistic"

Pierre Corneille, Dramatist

Pierre Corneille

"Fiction is life with the dull bits left out"

Clive James, Author

Clive James

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

Susan Sontag, Author

Susan Sontag

"The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels"

Simone de Beauvoir, Writer

Simone de Beauvoir

"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 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

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