Top Writers Quotes

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

In Ireland a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.

Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.

The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.

The beginning is easy what happens next is much harder.

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he sho...

I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.

Caesar had perished from the world of men Had not his sword been rescued by his pen.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons he would lose his angels.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.

Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.

John the Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx.

Footnotes the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

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

Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.