Top Writers Quotes

God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it. (Mad House)

If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.

If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surf...

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often if you flirt wit...

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.

Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our...

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

She was not a writer herself but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments.

Since language is the only tool with which writers can reflect and shape a culture, it must be transformed into art. Language is not a limitation on the art of literature; it is a glorification. It ha...

Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glu...

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one...

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations...

We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in...

We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves.

What about his style? asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted.Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks s...

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.