Quotes About Writing

Poe wrote like a drunkard and a man who is not accustomed to pay his debts.

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.

For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries: to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style.

Of all unfortunate men one of the unhappiest is a middling author endowed with too lively a sensibility for criticism.

I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer.

the writing of some men is like a vast bridge that carries you over the many things that claw and tear. The Wine of Forever

By the by, who ever knew a man who never read or wrote neither who hadn't got some small back parlour which he would call a study!

And then I settled into the most natural thing for a man with no real talents. Journalism.

I always say when you write a book, you're a 'one-man band.' Whereas, when you finish a screenplay, it's just a sketch.

The history of the development of contemporary writing in Vancouver from 1946 to 1960 is pretty largely a one-man show, and that man was me.

There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to understand the common antithesis of a good writer and a bad man.

I'm a man with a mission in two or three editions And I'm giving you a longing look Everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book.

There may be certain genres that men dominate, but fiction not so much. The question of prizes is tricky because there are so many prizes.

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

A man can make himself put down what comes, even if it seems nauseating nonsense; tomorrow some of it may not seem wholly nonsense at all.

My heroes are people like Philip Levine, who is simply like a god to me, as a writer. And he is a very good man, too.

A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

Literature nowadays is a trade... the successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets.

We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.

Writing, not dancing, is the chosen form of expression of the white man.