For Writers Quotes

He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.

There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths and the lesser ones who can only give you themselves.

(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

Fundamentally all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying about the brief flicker of time we have here and the frustrations that it creates.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.

Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.

If you would be a reader read if a writer write.

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language trying to get human feelings right.

Please never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.

The waste basket is a writer's best friend.

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.

Words and sentences are subjects of revision paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.

There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.

Now as through this world I ramble I see lots of funny men Some rob you with a six gun Some with a fountain pen.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.

Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.

I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.

A good writer is basically a story-teller not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.

A memorandum is written to protect the writer - not to inform his reader.

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers dear Readers are an afterthought.

You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you there of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right But where's the bloody horse?

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must seem to be inevitable.

On the trail of another man the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

All writers have their own pet commandments.