Selected writing quotes

1. Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

2. An author departs, he does not die.

3. Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

4. For I must write to The Times tonight, and save the world from sin.

5. Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.

6. He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

7. In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.

8. The best book on programming for the layman is 'Alice in Wonderland'; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

9. A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

10. If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

11. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

12. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

13. In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

14. Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

15. The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

16. The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

17. To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

18. I promised that from now on I would write only for the Lord.

19. Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

20. There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

21. The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.

22. Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbours among whom, our doctor followed his profession.

23. Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.

24. Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon take away from England her authors.

25. Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

26. Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

27. If I see an ending, I can work backward.

28. More books have resulted from somebody's need to write than from anybody's need to read.

29. I've lived on royalties all my life. It is the readers who have supported me.

30. I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

31. Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

32. Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

33. Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.

34. Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

35. I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.

36. I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity.

37. It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter.

38. I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.

39. You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

40. Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

41. Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem.

42. Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that.

43. I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.

44. By labor and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.

45. He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.

46. Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?

47. Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

48. To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.

49. I don't see myself as experimenting in any conscious way, it's perhaps that certain books require different densities of language.

50. I have a backlog of novels which I would love to be working on and would be working on if I were not obliged to hold down a full time job.

51. If I had the luxury of working as a full time writer, I think you would see novels appearing on a much more regular, and frequent, basis.

52. In my books I might hold the mirror to my own face. If others would like to borrow the mirror, they're welcome. The books aren't there to accuse others - merely to raise issues and keep the debates alive.

53. My work is known by too few people for me to be remembered as a writer - that is, beyond those dedicated souls (bless them) who have followed the oeuvre through its various stages. To be realistic, when they and the last of my friends have died, I doubt I shall be remembered at all.

54. The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.

55. The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

56. Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

57. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

58. The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

59. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

60. A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

61. Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.

62. Books, the children of the brain.

63. It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.

64. Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

65. Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

66. The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

67. Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

68. In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

69. Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.

70. Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them. 'Brick' was a good script just to read. It was like, 'Oh my God, these words feel so good in my mouth.' A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In 'Brick,' the world is born from the words.

71. Every writer I know has trouble writing.

72. Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

73. Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.

74. Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script.

75. The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

76. At present, I am a poet trying to be a soldier. To tell the truth, I am not interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression of something beautiful ... The only sort of book I care to write about the war is the sort people will read after the war is over - a century after it is over.

77. A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

78. Nothing in this book is true.

79. I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.

80. Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

81. When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

82. You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

83. If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you.

84. It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there.

85. I think that's easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read.

86. A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

87. Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

88. If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

89. They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

90. What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

91. It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.

92. A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

93. The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.

94. Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

95. I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

96. A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

97. To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.

98. Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

99. Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.

100. Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.