Top Writers Quotes

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the developme...

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.

In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

Read over your compositions and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine strike it out.

The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book I assure you.

Just get it down on paper and then we'll see what to do with it.

When an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

Words and sentences are subjects of revision paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.

There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.

A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.

History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about...