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Writing
- If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there's little point in writing.1922–95 English novelist and poet: in Radio Times 1 May 1971
- Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.1775–1817 English novelist: Mansfield Park (1814) ch. 48
- What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited sketches, full of variety and glow?—How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?1775–1817 English novelist: letter to J. Edward Austen, 16 December 1816
- Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.1826–77 English economist and essayist: Estimates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen (1858) ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’
- The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.1946– English novelist: Flaubert's Parrot (1984)
- It is a foolish thing to make a long prologue, and to be short in the story itself.: II Maccabees (Apocrypha) ch. 2, v. 32
- Of every four words I write, I strike out three.1636–1711 French critic and poet: Satire (2). A M. Molière (1665)
- Manuscripts don't burn.1891–1940 Russian writer: The Master and Margarita (1966–67)
- Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword.Burton1803–73 British novelist and politician: Richelieu (1839) act 2, sc. 2, l. 307; see - A writer must be as objective as a chemist: he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dung-heaps play a very reasonable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.1860–1904 Russian dramatist and short-story writer: letter to M. V. Kiselev, 14 January 1887
- My task which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.1857–1924 Polish-born English novelist: The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) preface
- They shut me up in prose—
As when a little girl
They put me in the closet—
Because they liked me ‘still’.1830–86 American poet: ‘They shut me up in prose’ (1862) - Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.1888–1965 American-born British poet, critic, and dramatist: The Sacred Wood (1920) ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’
- The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one…If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.1897–1962 American novelist: in Paris Review Spring 1956
- You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.1896–1940 American novelist: Edmund Wilson (ed.) The Crack-Up (1945) ‘Note-Books’
- My theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever after.1896–1940 American novelist: letter to the Booksellers' Convention, April 1920; Andrew Turnbull (ed.) Selected Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963)
- All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.1896–1940 American novelist: letter (undated) to his daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald; Andrew Turnbull (ed.) Selected Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963)
- Only connect!…Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.1879–1970 English novelist: Howards End (1910) ch. 22
- No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.1874–1963 American poet: Collected Poems (1939) ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’
- Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?1743–1805: Henry Best Personal and Literary Memorials (1829); alternatively attributed to the Duke of Cumberland and King George III
- Any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.1716–71 English poet: letter to Horace Walpole, 25 February 1768
- There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.1904–91 English novelist: A Sort of Life (1971)
- The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.1840–1928 English novelist and poet: notebook entry for 19 April 1885
- Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.1939–2013 Irish poet: ‘Digging’ (1966) - The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.1899–1961 American novelist: in Paris Review Spring 1958
- I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.1904–86 English novelist: Goodbye to Berlin (1939) ‘Berlin Diary’ Autumn 1930
- A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.1709–84 English poet, critic, and lexicographer: James Boswell Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) March 1750
- Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.quoting a college tutor1709–84 English poet, critic, and lexicographer: James Boswell Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) 30 April 1773
- No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.1709–84 English poet, critic, and lexicographer: James Boswell Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) 5 April 1776
- What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.1709–84 English poet, critic, and lexicographer: William Seward Biographia (1799)
- Whatsoever he [Shakespeare] penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been ‘Would he had blotted a thousand’.c.1573–1637 English dramatist and poet: Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (1641) l. 658 ‘De Shakespeare Nostrati’
- A writer's ambition should be…to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years.1905–83 Hungarian-born writer: in New York Times Book Review 1 April 1951
- When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, ‘Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!’1775–1834 English writer: letter to B. W. Proctor, 22 January 1829
- Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.1925–2013 American thriller writer: Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing (2010) Rule no. 10
- A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.1875–1955 German novelist: Tristan (1903) ch. 10
- What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.Housman, Pope1608–74 English poet: Paradise Lost (1667) bk. 1, l. 22; see - Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle 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.1925–64 American writer: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969) ‘The Nature and Aims of Fiction’
- Good prose is like a window-pane.1903–50 English novelist: Collected Essays (1968) vol. 1 ‘Why I Write’
- The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.1623–62 French mathematician, physicist, and moralist: Pensées (1670, ed. L. Brunschvicg, 1909) sect. 1, no. 19
- And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.1564–1616 English dramatist: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595–6) act 5, sc. 1, l. 14 (Oxford Standard Authors ed.) - You write with ease, to show your breeding,
But easy writing's vile hard reading.1751–1816 Irish dramatist and Whig politician: ‘Clio's Protest’ (written 1771, published 1819) - Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.1903–89 Belgian novelist: interview in Paris Review Summer 1955
- Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.1713–68 English novelist: Tristram Shandy (1759–67) bk. 2, ch. 11
- How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.1817–62 American writer: Journal 19 August 1851
- The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt.1935– American journalist and writer: in Sunday Times 9 June 1991; attributed
- Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.1815–82 English novelist: Autobiography (1883) ch. 15
- Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.1944– American poet: ‘One Child of One's Own’ in Janet Sternburg The Writer on her Work (1980)
- Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. 1882–1941 English novelist: Orlando (1928)
- A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.1882–1941 English novelist: A Room of One's Own (1929) ch. 1