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. Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties.

42. My friend was of opinion that when a man of rank appeared in that character [as an author], he deserved to have his merit handsomely allowed.

43. A man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.

44. I have known books written on Tolerance, the proper title of which would be - intolerant or intolerable books on tolerance. Should not a man who writes a book expressly to inculcate tolerance learn to treat with respect, or at least with indulgence, articles of faith which tens of thousands ten times told of his fellow-subjects or his fellow-creatures believe with all their souls, and upon the truth of which they rest their tranquillity in this world, and their hopes of salvation in the next, - those articles being at least maintainable against his arguments, and most certainly innocent in themselves?

45. My next shall be a more sober & chastised Epistle - but you see I was in the humour for metaphors - and to tell thee the Truth, I have so often serious reasons to quarrel with my Inclination, that I do not chuse to contradict it for Trifles.

46. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it.

47. For ett forfattarskap av lyrisk skonhet och etiskt djup, som lyfter fram vardagens mirakler och det levande forflutna.

48. God bless all the precious little examples and all their cascading implications; without these gems, these tiny acorns bearing the blueprints of oak trees, essayists would be out of business.

49. I am not unmindful of the journalist's quip that yesterday's paper wraps today's garbage. I am also not unmindful of the outrages visited upon our forests to publish redundant and incoherent collections of essays; for, like Dr. Seuss' Lorax, I like to think that I speak for the trees. Beyond vanity, my only excuses for a collection of these essays lie in the observation that many people like (and as many people despise) them, and that they seem to cohere about a common theme-Darwin's evolutionary perspective as an antidote to our cosmic arrogance.

50. Very few people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources-certainly not in necessary depth and comtemplation, and often not at all. [:] When writers close themselves off to the documents of scholarship, and then rely only on seeing or asking, they become conduits and sieves rather than thinkers. When, on the other hand, you study the great works of predecessors engaged in the same struggle, you enter a dialogue with human history and the rich variety of our own intellectual traditions. You insert yourself, and your own organizing powers, into this history-and you become an acive agent, not merely a 'reporter.'

51. What is particularly delightful about Steve's writing is the virtuosity with which he connects seemingly unrelated subjects to illuminate and strengthen his arguments. Whether right or wrong, Steve is always stimulating, and this is perhaps where he has made his greatest contribution-in awakening in thousands, if not millions, of his readers an enthusiasm for the secrets of this wonderful world of ours.

52. In his references to my own work, Gould includes at least nine citations that involve more than just an expression of Gould's opinion; in these citations Gould purportedly paraphrases my views. Yet in eight of the nine cases, Gould's representation of these views is false, misleading, or grossly caricatured. Nonspecialists could have no way of knowing any of this without reading the cited sources. While an author can occasionally make an inadvertent mistake in paraphrasing another, it appears Gould's paraphrases are consistently slanted to serve his own message.

53. Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to write a novel himself--either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete.

54. The writer in me distrusts the good citizen, the 'intellectual ambassador,' the human rights activist - those roles which are mentioned in the citation for this prize, much as I am committed to them. The writer is more skeptical, more self-doubting, than the person who tries to do (and to support) the right thing.

55. [Literature] is organised violence committed on ordinary speech.

56. I save about twenty drafts -- that's ten meg of disc space -- and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped.

57. I always thought Detritus would be good at: 'I bet you're wondrin' how many time I fired dis crossbow--'

58. If I heeded all the advice I've had over the years, I've have written 18 books about Rincewind.

59. Too many people want to have written.

60. Literary men are...a perpetual priesthood.

61. Thomas Jefferson: Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters (1984, ISBN 0-940450-16-X) Library of America edition; see discussion of sources at [3]. There are numerous one-volume collections; this is perhaps the best place to start.

62. I sense that novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3 - although it writes much faster than I can spell.

63. This baby (the Remington SL3 typewriter) speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.

64. Her surname resembled a line from an optometrist's examination chart.

65. I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit.

66. On the poor use of grammar It's a matter of usage. If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks. Our words are up to the job. It's our syntax that's limiting.

67. David Colman in 'Possessed; A Ring as Blunt as Her Advice' in The New York Times (6 July 2003)

68. About Jack Kerouac: 'That's not writing; That's typing.'

69. To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal.

70. Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without difficulty for he has always been comic for serious reasons. He has his own, almost romantic sense of propriety.

71. Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetichism that has given us those scores and scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists, anthropologists, topical 'problem' hunters, working-parties and statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds because he rejects information. He was himself the only information he required.

72. Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture.

73. To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the record?

74. If I say that Nabokov, who was educated in England... turns out to be a master of English prose - the most extraordinary phenomenon of the kind since Conrad - this is likely to sound incredible. If I say that Nabokov is something like Proust, something like Franz Kafka, and, probably something like Gogol, I shall suggest an imitative patchwork, where Nabokov is as completely himself as any of these others - a man with a unique sensibility and a unique story to tell.

75. Ainsi presque tout est imitation. L'idee des Lettres persanes est prise de celle de l'Espion turc. Le Boiardo a imite le Pulci, l'Arioste a imite le Boiardo. Les esprits les plus originaux empruntent les uns des autres.

76. Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.

77. The poem goes form the poet's gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.

78. A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.

79. (Albert:) 'I'd give them a piece of my mind if I could find it! I mean, them!' (Porky Pine, to Pogo:) 'Y'know, ol' Albert leads a life of noisy desperation.'

80. Poetry can be written only because it has been written.

81. Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.

82. Professor Bell, in his tortured efforts to sound fair and impersonal, arrives at an aesthetic principle too edifying for Art to bear. He says in effect that you can explore evil, drawing 'on the tap roots of the demonic,' but you may not approve it. But when you draw on those tap roots, who knows what you will find? Writers just back from their season in hell are likely to be covered in goat blood and tend to rave. The moralists can sort out the evidence later. But the writer with the correct attitude could not have entered hell in the first place.

83. Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations - that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling.

84. Happy the man with a book-length grievance - and rare. Each of these books contains one possible magazine article surrounded by more padding than an offensive lineman: every little indignity that ever happened to them, and every two-bit feud, magnified to a Horrible Example to justify a larger printing.

85. This country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn't take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man.

86. All my work is highly personal; it's more personal than me. You know, reading my books is having a far more intimate relationship with me than having a relationship with me.

87. Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to leave the 'Aeneid' unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the 'Georgics,' where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, 'I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.'

88. One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: 'Hammer your thoughts into unity.' For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence.

89. Nouns of number, or multitude, such as Mob, Parliament, Rabble, House of Commons, Regiment, Court of King's Bench, Den of Thieves, and the like.

90. One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers:He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; 'lays waste' a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the Government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country. He is not only unquestionably the most powerful political writer of the present day, but one of the best writers in the language. He speaks and thinks plain, broad, downright English.

91. It is especially his bad language that is always good. It is precisely the passages that have always been recognized as good style that would now be regarded as bad form. And it is precisely these violent passages that especially bring out not only the best capacities of Cobbett but also the best capacities of English.

92. Dilsey stroked Ben's head, slowly and steadily, smoothing the bang upon his brow. He wailed quietly, unhurriedly. 'Hush,' Dilsey said. 'Hush, now. We be gone in a minute. Hush, now.' He wailed quietly and steadily.

93. Reader, - This Enchiridion, I present thee with, is the Fruit of Solitude: A School few care to learn in, tho' None Instructs us better. Some Parts of it are the Result of serious Reflection: Others the Flashings of Lucid Intervals: Writ for private Satisfaction, and now publish'd for an Help to Human Conduct.

94. Kerouac (editing Naked Lunch): Bill, what is all this stuff about young naked boys being hanged in limestone caves? Burroughs: No idea. I know I'm some kind of interplanetary agent but I don't think my signals are decoding properly.

95. I think all novelists particularly are engaged in the creation of Tulpas. That is exactly what they are doing. Ahh... they are trying to create characters that have an existence apart from the novel, apart from the page.

96. If you can't write a decent short story because of the cold, write something else. Write anything. Write a long letter to somebody.

97. What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story, but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn't find any.

98. There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.

99. I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language what they already know.

100. A man must pretend not to be a writer.