Writing

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote

The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none.

François René Chateaubriand, Le Génie du Christianisme

To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.

Anton Chekhov

Writing a book is an adventure: it begins as an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, then a master, and finally a tyrant.

Winston Churchill

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

Irvin S. Cobb

Writers become idiotic under flattery sooner than any other set of people in the world.

Frank Moore Colby

No man was ever yet a poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographical Literaria, 1817

If there is a special hell for writers, it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

John Dos Passos

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

Epictetus

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate — the Ode to a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

William Faulkner

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn't hesitate to do so.

André Gide

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

A bad book is as much a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Aldous Huxley

Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Samuel Johnson

Writers and artists are dreadful people — vain, self-obsessed, irresponsible and exploitative. They need to be, if only to believe that their perceptions are worth imposing on the world.

Minette Marrin, Sunday Telegraph, 1998

The author should keep his mouth shut when his work begins to speak.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Great writers are always evil influences; second-rate writers are not wicked enough to become great.

George Bernard Shaw

One of the greatest things that writers did, I thought, was to isolate an event, and light it with imagination, to make people understand and remember; and not just events, but people and their passions.

Paul Theroux, My Secret History, 1989

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Ivana Trump

The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.

E. B. White

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