Quotes about Writing

"Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire, then wrote a piece so that she could be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer-- and if so why?" ~Bennett Cerf

"Writing is play, and there is no reason why you should get paid for playing. If you're a real writer, you write no matter what. No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys the writing, even if he doesn't get paid for it." ~ Irwin Shaw

"There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long evenings." ~Quentin Crisp

"A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others." ~William Faulkner

"You write a hit play the same way you write a flop." ~William Saroyan

"Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still." ~T.S. Eliot

"The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to become famous or the intent to be great doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out." ~Lillian Hellman

"The maker of a sentence launches out into the inifnite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The Illiad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle." ~G.K. Chesterton

"Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism." ~William Phillips

"The principal aim of all storytelling is to expose the inner working of the human mind through conflict, whether it be told in a short story, novel, radio, movie, or play." ~Lajos Egri

"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense."
~Mark Twain

"Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the makings of a dramatist." ~Kenneth Tynan

"The thriller is the extenstion of the fairy tale. It is melodrama so embellished as to create the illusion that the story being told, however unlikely, could be true." ~Raymond Chandler

"Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it." ~Robert Penn Warren

"...[the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed-- love and horror and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." ~William Faulkner

"The whole duty of a writer is to satisfy himself, and the true writer plays to an audience of one." ~E.B. White

"There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft." ~Jessamyn West

"When characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him." ~Luigi Pirandello

"Art, like life, should be free, since both are experimental" ~George Santayana

"In my writing I tell the story of my life, over and over again." ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write, you've got to write, there's no short cut, you have to start your career all over again." ~William Saroyan

"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream." ~Jorge Luis Borges