Writing 

1. If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there's little point in writing.
   Kingsley Amis 1922–95 English novelist and poet: in Radio Times 1 May 1971
2. Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.
   Jane Austen 1775–1817 English novelist: Mansfield Park (1814) ch. 48
3. 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?
   Jane Austen 1775–1817 English novelist: letter to J. Edward Austen, 16 December 1816
4. Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
   Walter Bagehot 1826–77 English economist and essayist: Estimates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen (1858) ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’
5. The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
   Julian Barnes 1946–  English novelist: Flaubert's Parrot (1984)
6. It is a foolish thing to make a long prologue, and to be short in the story itself.
   
    
   The Bible (Authorized Version, 1611): II Maccabees (Apocrypha) ch. 2, v. 32
7. Of every four words I write, I strike out three.
   Nicolas Boileau 1636–1711 French critic and poet: Satire (2). A M. Molière (1665)
8. Manuscripts don't burn.
   Mikhail Bulgakov 1891–1940 Russian writer: The Master and Margarita (1966–67)
9. Beneath the rule of men entirely great
   The pen is mightier than the sword.
   
    
   Edward George Bulwer-Lytton 1803–73 British novelist and politician: Richelieu (1839) act 2, sc. 2, l. 307; see Burton
10. 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.
    Anton Chekhov 1860–1904 Russian dramatist and short-story writer: letter to M. V. Kiselev, 14 January 1887
11. 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.
    Joseph Conrad 1857–1924 Polish-born English novelist: The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) preface
12. They shut me up in prose—
    As when a little girl
    They put me in the closet—
    Because they liked me ‘still’.
    
     
    Emily Dickinson 1830–86 American poet: ‘They shut me up in prose’ (1862)
13. 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.
    T. S. Eliot 1888–1965 American-born British poet, critic, and dramatist: The Sacred Wood (1920) ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’
14. 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.
    William Faulkner 1897–1962 American novelist: in Paris Review Spring 1956
15. You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940 American novelist: Edmund Wilson (ed.) The Crack-Up (1945) ‘Note-Books’
16. 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.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940 American novelist: letter to the Booksellers' Convention, April 1920; Andrew Turnbull (ed.) Selected Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963)
17. All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940 American novelist: letter (undated) to his daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald; Andrew Turnbull (ed.) Selected Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963)
18. Only connect!…Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.
    E. M. Forster 1879–1970 English novelist: Howards End (1910) ch. 22
19. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
    Robert Frost 1874–1963 American poet: Collected Poems (1939) ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’
20. Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?
    William Henry, Duke of Gloucester 1743–1805: Henry Best Personal and Literary Memorials (1829); alternatively attributed to the Duke of Cumberland and King George III
21. Any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.
    Thomas Gray 1716–71 English poet: letter to Horace Walpole, 25 February 1768
22. There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.
    Graham Greene 1904–91 English novelist: A Sort of Life (1971)
23. The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
    Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 English novelist and poet: notebook entry for 19 April 1885
24. Between my finger and my thumb
    The squat pen rests.
    I'll dig with it.
    
     
    Seamus Heaney 1939–2013 Irish poet: ‘Digging’ (1966)
25. 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.
    Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961 American novelist: in Paris Review Spring 1958
26. I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.
    Christopher Isherwood 1904–86 English novelist: Goodbye to Berlin (1939) ‘Berlin Diary’ Autumn 1930
27. A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.
    Samuel Johnson 1709–84 English poet, critic, and lexicographer: James Boswell Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) March 1750
28. Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
    quoting a college tutor
    Samuel Johnson 1709–84 English poet, critic, and lexicographer: James Boswell Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) 30 April 1773
29. No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
    Samuel Johnson 1709–84 English poet, critic, and lexicographer: James Boswell Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) 5 April 1776
30. What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
    Samuel Johnson 1709–84 English poet, critic, and lexicographer: William Seward Biographia (1799)
31. Whatsoever he [Shakespeare] penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been ‘Would he had blotted a thousand’.
    Ben Jonson c.1573–1637 English dramatist and poet: Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (1641) l. 658 ‘De Shakespeare Nostrati’
32. 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.
    Arthur Koestler 1905–83 Hungarian-born writer: in New York Times Book Review 1 April 1951
33. When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, ‘Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!’
    Charles Lamb 1775–1834 English writer: letter to B. W. Proctor, 22 January 1829
34. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
    Elmore Leonard 1925–2013 American thriller writer: Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing (2010) Rule no. 10
35. A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
    Thomas Mann 1875–1955 German novelist: Tristan (1903) ch. 10
36. 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.
    
     
    John Milton 1608–74 English poet: Paradise Lost (1667) bk. 1, l. 22; see Housman, Pope
37. 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.
    Flannery O'Connor 1925–64 American writer: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969) ‘The Nature and Aims of Fiction’
38. Good prose is like a window-pane.
    George Orwell 1903–50 English novelist: Collected Essays (1968) vol. 1 ‘Why I Write’
39. The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
    Blaise Pascal 1623–62 French mathematician, physicist, and moralist: Pensées (1670, ed. L. Brunschvicg, 1909) sect. 1, no. 19
40. 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.
    
     
    William Shakespeare 1564–1616 English dramatist: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595–6) act 5, sc. 1, l. 14 (Oxford Standard Authors ed.)
41. You write with ease, to show your breeding,
    But easy writing's vile hard reading.
    
     
    Richard Brinsley Sheridan 1751–1816 Irish dramatist and Whig politician: ‘Clio's Protest’ (written 1771, published 1819)
42. Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.
    Georges Simenon 1903–89 Belgian novelist: interview in Paris Review Summer 1955
43. Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
    Laurence Sterne 1713–68 English novelist: Tristram Shandy (1759–67) bk. 2, ch. 11
44. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
    Henry David Thoreau 1817–62 American writer: Journal 19 August 1851
45. The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt.
    Calvin Trillin 1935–  American journalist and writer: in Sunday Times 9 June 1991; attributed
46. Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.
    Anthony Trollope 1815–82 English novelist: Autobiography (1883) ch. 15
47. Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
    Alice Walker 1944–  American poet: ‘One Child of One's Own’ in Janet Sternburg The Writer on her Work (1980)
48. Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
    Virginia Woolf 1882–1941 English novelist: Orlando (1928)
49. A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
    Virginia Woolf 1882–1941 English novelist: A Room of One's Own (1929) ch. 1