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Quotes about writing

377 quotes from 206 people

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I mean, look at them all: Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Smollet, Fielding, they’re all funny. All the good ones are funny.
Martin Amis1949–2023Prospect interview (2010)
- Humor
The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.
Raymond Chandler1888–1959“Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel” (essay, 1949), first published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)
Thou art a monument, without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
Ben Jonson1572–1637To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare (First Folio, 1623), lines 22-24
- Reading
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Toni Morrison1931–2019“Black Matters” in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don’t doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men’s.
Harriet Beecher Stowe1811–1896The Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine (1862).
- Women
I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.
James Joyce1882–1941Said in conversation with Frank Budgen, Zurich, 1918, as told by Budgen in his book James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (1934), ch. IV
I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
Cormac McCarthy1933–2023The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2009, “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy” by John Jurgensen
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy: I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of it is not my concern.
Henry Miller1891–1980“Reflections on Writing”, in The Wisdom of the Heart (1941)
An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain.
Upton Sinclair1878–1968100%: the Story of a Patriot (1920), Section 2
Anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.
MSMurasaki Shikibu978–1014The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 25
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
Roald Dahl1916–1990“Goodbye school” in Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984)
- Freedom
There is in the word, in the logos, something sacred which forbids us to gamble with it. To handle a language skilfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire1821–1867XIV: “Théophile Gautier” , as translated in The Idea of Poetry in France: From Houdar de La Motte to Baudelaire (1958) by Margaret Gilman, p. 263
There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.
H. P. Lovecraft1890–1937Letter to J. Vernon Shea (August 7, 1931), quoted in “H.P. Lovecraft, a Life” by S.T. Joshi, p. 579
- Life & Death
Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
W. H. Auden1907–1973Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
- Money
Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either.
John Irvingborn 1942Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1988)
- Clever Jabs