Quotes About Writing

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I? Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.

My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.

In literature mere egotism is delightful.

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should probably forget all about them.' 'Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.

The pen is mightier than the paving-stone

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I wish i could write them down, these little coloured parables or poems that live for a moment in some cell of my brain, and then leave it to go wandering elsewhere. I hate writing; the mere act of writing a thing down is troublesome to me. I want some fine medium, and look for it in vain.

I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at any rate, so that, if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books, and what joy can be greater?

There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them.

You talk books away, he said; why don't you write one? I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.

Non vi sono libri morali o libri immorali. Vi sono libri scritti bene e libri scritti male, e nient'altro.

Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.

I shall write it in my diary to-night What? That a burnt child loves the fire

No existen libros morales o inmorales. Los libros están bien o mal escritos. Eso es todo.

I'm too fond of reading books to care to write them.

I wrote when I did not know life. Now that I know life, I have no more to write.

A book is either nicely written or it's badly written. That's it.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But there is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.

Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)

Dicere quae puduit, scribere jussit amor

The unpleasant, acrid smell of burnt poetry.

I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.