Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"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

"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea"

John Updike, Novelist

John Updike

"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

"The streets were dark with something more than night"

Raymond Chandler, Writer

Raymond Chandler

"If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come"

Raymond Chandler, Writer

Raymond Chandler

"A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled"

Raymond Chandler, Writer

Raymond Chandler

"This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof"

Neil Gaiman, Author

Neil Gaiman

"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

"I write to understand, as much as to be understood"

Elie Wiesel, Novelist

Elie Wiesel

"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

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

Andre Breton, Poet

Andre Breton

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

James Baldwin, Educator

James Baldwin

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

Robert Benchley, Comedian

Robert Benchley

"It is difficult not to write satire"

Juvenal, Poet

Juvenal

"There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

Carl Sandburg

"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

"You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length"

Carl Friedrich Gauss, Mathematician

Carl Friedrich Gauss

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

Hippocrates, Scientist

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

Daniel Keys Moran, Writer

Daniel Keys Moran

"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

"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

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

J. K. Rowling, Author

"Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo - Jo being the writer and the misfit"

Patti Smith, Musician

"One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines"

Emile Zola, Novelist

Emile Zola

"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

"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

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

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Novelist

"Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel"

Andre Maurois, Writer

Andre Maurois

"I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living"

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Writer

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher"

Flannery O'Connor, Author

"All good Literature rests primarily on insight"

George Henry Lewes, Philosopher

George Henry Lewes

"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location"

Flannery O'Connor, Author

"Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature"

George Henry Lewes, Philosopher

George Henry Lewes

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