For five months I got up at six o’clock and got dressed by the lamplight. The fire would not yet be on. The house was very cold but I would put on a heavy coat, sit with my feet up to keep them from freezing and with fingers so cramped that I could scarcely hold a pen. I would write my stunt for the day. Sometimes it would be a poem in which I would carol blithely of blue skies and rippling brooks and flowery meads! Then I would thaw out my hands, eat breakfast and go to school. When people say to me, as they occasionally do, ‘Oh how I envy your gift, how I wish I could write as you do’, I am inclined to wonder, with some inward amusement, how much they would have envied me on those dark, cold, winter mornings of my apprenticeship.
—Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) Canadian Novelist, Diarists
I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, “I will tell you a story,” and then he passes the hat.
—Robertson Davies (1913–95) Canada Journalist, Playwright, Academic, Critic, Novelist
Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both Rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-born American Novelist
Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
—Brian Aldiss (b.1925) English Novelist
A writer needs three things: experience, observation, and imagination—any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
—William Faulkner (1897–1962) American Novelist
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-born American Novelist
I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides, poisons are neat and clean and really exciting… I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse.
—Agatha Christie (1890-1976) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.
—Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) American Novelist, Human Rights Activist
The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
—Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) American Dancer, Choreographer
I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.
—James A. Michener (1907–97) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Historian
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.
—William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) English Novelist
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.
—E. L. Doctorow (1931–2015) American Writer, Editor, Academic
Every writer “creates” his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
I wrote a poem to the moon|But no one noticed it;|Although I hoped that late or soon|Someone would praise a bit|Its purity and grace forlone,|Its beauty tulip-cool…|But as my poem died still-born,|I felt a fool.||I wrote a verse of vulgar trend|Spiced with an oath or two;|I tacked a snapper at the end|And called it Dan McGrew.|I spouted it to bar-room boys,|Full fifty years away;|Yet still with rude and ribald noise|It lives today.||’Tis bitter truth, but there you are-|That’s how a name is made;|Write of a rose, a lark, a star,|You’ll never make the grade.|But write of gutter and of grime,|Of pimp and prostitute,|The multitude will read your rhyme,|And pay to boot.||So what’s the use to burn and bleed|And strive for beauty’s sake?|No one your poetry will read,|Your heart will only break.|But set your song in vulgar pitch,|If rhyme you will not rue,|And make your heroine a bitch…|Like Lady Lou.
—Robert W. Service (1874–1958) Scottish Poet, Author
The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
The circumstance which gives authors an advantage above all these great masters, is this, that they can multiply their originals; or rather, can make copies of their works, to what number they please, which shall be as valuable as the originals themselves.
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719) English Essayist, Poet, Playwright, Politician
Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American Pediatrician, Doctor, Poet, Socialist, Author
If writers were good businessmen, they’d have too much sense to be writers.
—Irvin S. Cobb (1876–1944) American Humorist, Short Story Writer, Columnist
Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.
—Jean Paul (1763–1825) German Novelist, Humorist
A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer – to be living a kind of double life.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
I have used these weeks to revalue values. Do you understand this expression?. When you come right down to it, the alchemist is the most praiseworthy of men: I mean the one who changes something negligible or contemptible into something of value, even gold. He alone enriches, the others merely exchange. My task is quite singular this time: I have asked myself what mankind has always hated, feared, and despised the most.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German Philosopher, Author
What I have crossed out I didn’t like. What I haven’t crossed out I’m dissatisfied with.
—Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959) American Film Producer, Film Director, Screenwriter, Actor
Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest “swell,” but he simply cannot buy the right things.
—William James (1842–1910) American Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician
Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.
—Stephen Vizinczey (b.1933) Hungarian-born Canadian Novelist, Literary Critic, Author
Ten censure wrong, for one that writes amiss.
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744) English Poet
The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
—Nelson Algren (1909–81) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-born American Novelist
Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.
—Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) English Novelist, Short Story Writer, Dramatist
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
—E. M. Forster (1879-1970) English Novelist, Short Story Writer, Essayist
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
—Pablo Neruda (1904-73) Chilean Poet, Diplomat, Political leader
There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: “More money for more work.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) English Occultist, Mystic, Magician
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
—J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) English Novelist, Short Story Writer
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-born American Novelist
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
—Oliver Herford (1863–1935) American Writer, Artist, Illustrator
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
—Groucho Marx (1890-1977) American Actor, Comedian, Singer
It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
Novels are longer than life.
—Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972) American Playwright, Poet, Novelist
On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of…. I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.
—A. E. Housman (1859–1936) British Poet, Scholar
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
—Martin Amis (b.1949) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
—E. L. Doctorow (1931–2015) American Writer, Editor, Academic
The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney, Writer
In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.
—Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American Sociologist
The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American Novelist, Playwright
When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.
—Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) Italian Dramatist, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Author
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
—James A. Michener (1907–97) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Historian
Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors — somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating — none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.
—James A. Michener (1907–97) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Historian
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
—Italo Calvino (1923–85) Italian Journalist, Short Story Writer, Novelist, Essayist
A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can’t fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.
—Groucho Marx (1890-1977) American Actor, Comedian, Singer
I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
—Ken Kesey (1935–2001) American Novelist, Essayist, Short Story Writer
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 (1899-1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
—Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French Philosopher, Psychoanalyst, Poet
If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I’d love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.
—Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) Italian Dramatist, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Author
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
—E. L. Doctorow (1931–2015) American Writer, Editor, Academic
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
—Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) British Novelist