A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. – Edna St. Vincent Millay
Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. – Jules Renard, Journal, 1895 April 10th
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. – Ray Bradbury
Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear — and devils, too. – Terri Guillemets
Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. – Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf, 1927
You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world. – G.K. Chesterton
I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end with a skyscraper made of wood. – Norman Mailer
It is possible to regard Norman Mailer as one of the prices we pay for widespread literacy. – Richard Gilman, “Why Mailer Wants to be President,” in The New Republic, 1964 Fe
The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax. – Alfred Kazin, Think, February 1963
Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals. – Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927
Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. – Samuel Johnson, “Recalling the Advice of a College Tutor,” Boswell, Life of John
The universe will do the writing for you, if you just listen close enough. – Terri Guillemets
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, Saturday Review, 1957 September 21st
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. – George Orwell, “Why I Write,” 1947 (Thanks, Jennifer)
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. – Hart Crane
He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink. – John Ray
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. – G.K. Chesterton
Novelists… fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence. – Fay Weldon
