Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets"

Christopher Morley, Author

Christopher Morley

"The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage"

Edward Bond, Playwright

Edward Bond

"Shakespeare has no answers for us at all"

Edward Bond, Playwright

Edward Bond

"I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me"

Edward Bond, Playwright

Edward Bond

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you"

Ray Bradbury, Writer

Ray Bradbury

"My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off"

Ray Bradbury, Writer

Ray Bradbury

"Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the stroller of his conviction"

Walter Benjamin, Critic

Walter Benjamin

"Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever puts one down without the feeling of disappointment"

Charles Lamb, Critic

Charles Lamb

"Journalism is literature in a hurry"

Matthew Arnold, Poet

Matthew Arnold

"In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country's fate, you alone are my comfort and support, oh great, powerful, righteous, and free Russian language!"

Ivan Turgenev, Novelist

Ivan Turgenev

"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Novelist

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures"

Jessamyn West, Author

Jessamyn West

"Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also"

Billy Wilder, Director

Billy Wilder

"Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood"

William Howard Taft, President

"The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party"

Goldwin Smith, Historian

"A novel is a mirror carried along a main road"

Stendhal, Writer

"It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean"

Norton Juster, Architect

"I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead, I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth"

Norton Juster, Architect

"And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters"

Norton Juster, Architect

"A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug"

George Borrow, Author

"A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind"

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Novelist

"I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written"

Seamus Heaney, Poet

"That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems"

Georg Brandes, Critic

"Writing for young children, I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children, too"

Margaret Mahy, Author

Margaret Mahy

"It is a good idea to know which publishers publish which stories. For example, there is no sense in sending a picture book text to a publisher who does not publish picture books"

Margaret Mahy, Author

Margaret Mahy

"Every writer has to find their own way into writing"

Margaret Mahy, Author

Margaret Mahy

"Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore"

Robyn Davidson, Writer

"You apply the skills you use to produce your own book to make an anthology. Shaping. Rhythm"

Robyn Davidson, Writer

"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing"

Norman Mailer, Novelist

"The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that's filed everywhere else except under travel"

Robyn Davidson, Writer

"Translation is the art of failure"

Umberto Eco, Novelist

"Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage"

Harold Bloom, Critic

Harold Bloom

"I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist"

Harold Bloom, Critic

Harold Bloom

"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all"

Richard Wright, Novelist

Richard Wright

"Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process"

Peter Shaffer, Playwright

Peter Shaffer

"I get to show the reader the essence of the book without giving anything away"

Mary Grandpre, Illustrator

"The main engagement of the writer is towards truthfulness; therefore he must keep his mind and his judgement free"

Gabrielle Roy, Author

Gabrielle Roy

"I did a series called Ned and Stacey for two years for Fox back in the '90s. I was writer on it as well as a producer, and it was very important to me that there were no contemporary references"

Thomas Haden Church, Actor

Thomas Haden Church

"What, nephew, said the king, is the wind in that door?"

Thomas Malory, Author

"Every writer I know has trouble writing"

Joseph Heller, Novelist

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