Quotes About Writing

There is one really important thing I must write which I have forgotten.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

Le bonheur est comme l'été : il n'irradie pas. Rien à attendre de son souvenir pour les jours où nous aurons froid. - Il y a des sensations qui écrivent en lettres ineffaçables. Le bonheur écrit blanc.

L'anecdote, cette moisissure qui se forme sur tous les livres.

An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.

Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), a scurrilous burlesque, written mostly by John Arbuthnot, that poked fun at Grub Street twittishness. He chose this indelicate item because it was a source of interesting words like 'chicanery', 'confidant', 'troglodyte' and 'piazza', and even the distinctly modern-sounding 'skylight'.

I'm no romantic, surfing, California boy. I like reading, writing, philosophizing. Scheming. I've been doing some exploration of the inner space.

I'm glad you like adverbs—I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

If I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience and experience only," I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost."

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

Don't underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL MYSTERY AUTHOR

She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me.

I'd rather sit down and write a letter than call someone up. I hate the telephone.

Ink is the cosmetic that ideas will wear when they go out in public. Graphite is their dirty truth.

There is both a skill factor and an effort factor in dream recall. People can develop dream recall skills, such as lying still in the morning and writing down whatever comes to mind.

What is precious to us in an author's work is the labor of his soul and not the architectural structure in which he packs his thoughts and feelings.

A writer is precious and necessary for us only to the extent to which he reveals to us the inner labour of his soul.

Our profession is dreadful, writing corrupts the soul.

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

I am writing a novel,' Tolstoy informed his friend the critic Nikolai Strakhov on 11 May 1873, referring to the book that was to become Anna Karenina. 'I've been at it for more than a month now and the main lines are traced out. This novel is truly a novel, the first in my life …

I wrote everything into Anna Karenina, and nothing was left over.