Writers On Writing

Being a writer means having homework for the rest of your life.
-- Lawrence Kasdan

No one asked you to be a writer.
-- Sherwood Anderson

Writers are always selling somebody out.
-- Joan Didion (Slouching Toward Bethlehem)

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
-- Pierre Abelard

What! Another of those damned fat, square, thick books! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon.
-- The Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon

Authors are easy enough to get on with - if you are fond of children.
-- Michael Joseph (The Observer, London, 1949)

Every writer, without exception, is a masochist, a sadist, a peeping Tom, an exhibitionist, a narcissist, an 'injustice collector' and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity.
-- Edmund Bergler, M.D.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.
-- Don Marquis

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.
-- George Simenon

Writers are just schmucks with Underwoods.
-- Jack Warner

Writing is easy, you just sit down at the typewriter, open up a vein, and bleed it out drop by drop.
-- Red Smith

What is written without effort is in general, read without pleasure.
-- Samuel Johnson

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
-- Samuel Johnson

Kill your darlings.
-- William Faulkner

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.
-- Hilaire Belloc

One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.
-- Wilfrid Sheed

One of your first jobs, as you write for money, will be to get rid of your vocabulary.
-- Jack Woodford

I am in the smallest room of my house. Your book is before me. Soon it will be behind me.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
-- John Steinbeck

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
-- Peter De Vries

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.
-- A. A. Milne

"I'll bet Shakespeare didn't miss his son's birthday party," Faulkner's son, after Faulkner missed the party, preferring to write. "Who the hell cares about Shakespeare's kids?" replied Faulkner.

Writing a book is an adventure: it begins as an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, then a master, and finally a tyrant.
-- Sir Winston Churchill

Some day I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.
-- Clarence Darrow

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

No furniture so charming as books.
-- Sydney Smith

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
-- Oscar Wilde

'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.
-- Mark Twain

One man is as good as another until he's written a book.
-- Benjamin Jowett

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith

I read part of it all the way through.
-- Samuel Goldwyn

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
-- Dorothy Parker

I will lose no time reading your book.
-- (Probably Shaw or Mencken)

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.
-- Fran Lebowitz

Book - what they make a movie out of for television.
-- Leonard Louis Leinson

Authors are judged by strange capricious rules. The great ones are thought mad, the small ones fools.
-- Alexander Pope

In general I do not draw well with literary men - not that I dislike them but - but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.
-- Lord Byron

I know of no person so perfectly disagreeable and even dangerous as an author.
-- William IV

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

At this point, Constant Weeder frowed up.
-- Dorothy Parker

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writers novels.
-- P. G. Wodehouse

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
-- Robert Benchley

Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.
-- Wendy Cope

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.
-- Calvin Trillin

If you can't annoy somebody with what your write, I think there's little point in writing.
-- Kingsley Amis

Murder is a crime. Writing about it isn't. Sex is not a crime, but writing about it is. Why?
-- Larry Flynt

Many, many people have done a lot more sexual experimentation than I have. Yet it's the one who writes about it who is thought to be weird.
-- Erica Jong

At last, an unprintable book that is fit to read.
-- Ezra Pound on Tropic of Cancer

I write to get out of jail.
-- Tom Stoppard

A good reader is rarer than a good writer.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

To Dwight MacDonald: Don't you realize, Dwight, you have nothing to say, only to add.
-- Gore Vidal

Writers aren't exactly people. Or if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying to so hard to one person.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

How'm I gonna do decent pictures when all my good writers are in jail...Don't misunderstand me, they all ought to be hung.
-- Dororthy Parker quoting Samuel Goldwyn

Goldwyn on a writer. We're overpaying him, but he's worth it.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who write know anything.
-- Walter Bagehot

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
-- Josh Billings

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I want to read a good book, I write one.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.
-- Geoffrey Cottrell

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
-- William Faulkner

First you're an unknown, then you write a book and you move up to obscurity.
-- Martin Myers

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
-- Flannery O'Connor

The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is unread.
-- Oscar Wilde

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
-- Virginia Woolf

I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the authors knowing it.
-- Edith Wharton

Poetry is what gets lost in the translation.
-- Robert Frost

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: the 'Ode to a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.
-- William Faulkner

Asked how he became a writer: In the same way that a woman becomes a prostitute. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and finally I did it for money.
-- Ferenc Molnar

Events of the past two years have virtually decreed that I shall wrestle with the literary muse for the rest of my days. And so, having tasted the poverty of one end of the scale, I have no choice but to direct my energies toward the acquisiton of fame and fortune. Frankly, I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.
-- From a letter from Hunter S. Thompson to Mr. Arch Gerhart, 29 January 1958