Writers And Writing

(35 votes)   Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

E. L. Doctorow
1931-, American Novelist

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(32 votes)   I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

A. J. Liebling
1904-1963, American Journalist

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(19 votes)   Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Patrick Dennis

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(244 votes)   It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Vita Sackville-West
1892-1962, British Novelist, Poet

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(221 votes)   If you have ever read anything that has made you laugh or cry or just want to throw that damn book across the room, you can't say that it wasn't art.

Anonymous

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(214 votes)   Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
1803-1873, British Novelist, Poet

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(205 votes)   Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Joseph Joubert
1754-1824, French Moralist

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(195 votes)   The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

Renata Adler
American Author

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(191 votes)   No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

James Joyce
1882-1941, Irish Author

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(185 votes)   Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Brian Aldiss
1925-, British Science Fiction Writer

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(177 votes)   Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.

Jean Paul Richter
1763-1825, German Novelist

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(162 votes)   What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Edward Dahlberg
1900-1977, American Author, Critic

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(150 votes)   Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To ''Why am I here?'' To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Enid Bagnold
1889-1981, British Novelist, Playwright

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(101 votes)   But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Charlotte Bronte
1816-1855, British Novelist

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(101 votes)   No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

W. H. Auden
1907-1973, Anglo-American Poet

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