Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new"

William Makepeace Thackeray, Novelist

William Makepeace Thackeray

"A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation"

Joseph Addison, Writer

Joseph Addison

"I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies"

Thomas B. Macaulay, Historian

Thomas B. Macaulay

"We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own"

John Le Carre, Author

John Le Carre

"Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do!"

John Le Carre, Author

John Le Carre

"I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives"

John Le Carre, Author

John Le Carre

"A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it"

Thornton Wilder, Writer

Thornton Wilder

"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes"

Thornton Wilder, Writer

Thornton Wilder

"When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

Stephen Sondheim

"My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language"

Edward Gibbon, Historian

Edward Gibbon

"The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event"

Edward Gibbon, Historian

Edward Gibbon

"At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poet

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible"

Vladimir Nabokov, Novelist

Vladimir Nabokov

"Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed"

Vladimir Nabokov, Novelist

Vladimir Nabokov

"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man"

Vladimir Nabokov, Novelist

Vladimir Nabokov

"Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well"

Andre Breton, Poet

Andre Breton

"A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens"

John Updike, Novelist

John Updike

"Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing"

Ken Kesey, Author

Ken Kesey

"Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it"

Roland Barthes, Critic

Roland Barthes

"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose"

P. G. Wodehouse, Writer

P. G. Wodehouse

"To hell with facts! We need stories!"

Ken Kesey, Author

Ken Kesey

"It is difficult not to write satire"

Juvenal, Poet

Juvenal

"The streets were dark with something more than night"

Raymond Chandler, Writer

Raymond Chandler

"The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps"

Robert Benchley, Comedian

Robert Benchley

"Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles"

Annie Dillard, Author

Annie Dillard

"One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography"

William Ellery Channing, Writer

William Ellery Channing

"There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them"

Elie Wiesel, Novelist

Elie Wiesel

"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him"

James Baldwin, Educator

James Baldwin

"Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim"

E. B. White, Writer

"Be obscure, clearly"

E. B. White, Writer

"All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days"

E. B. White, Writer

"Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing"

Hilaire Belloc, Poet

Hilaire Belloc

"Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry"

William Golding, Novelist

William Golding

"It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does"

Daniel Keys Moran, Writer

Daniel Keys Moran

"Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel"

Andre Maurois, Writer

Andre Maurois

"Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Novelist

"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both, you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Novelist

"I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity"

J. K. Rowling, Author

"The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words"

Hippocrates, Scientist

"Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire"

J. K. Rowling, Author

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