David Lovelock collects quotations on writing.
"I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat—just to get the darned thing finished." Alistair MacLean
"I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing." Alistair MacLean
"I'm not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do, no mystique." Alistair Maclean
"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." Bernard Malamud
"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Thomas Mann
"An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates." Thomas Mann
"In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius." Thomas Mann
"It is as well that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not also its origins, the conditions under which it came into being." Thomas Mann
"Literature… is the union of suffering with the instinct for form." Thomas Mann
"Nothing gladdens a writer more than a thought that can become pure feeling and a feeling that can become pure thought." Thomas Mann
"Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates." Thomas Mann
"The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea." Thomas Mann
"The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought." Thomas Mann
"Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol." Steve Martin
"I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing." Steve Martin
"I handed in a script last year and the studio didn't change one word. The word they didn't change was on page 87." Steve Martin
"I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words." Steve Martin
"I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper." Steve Martin
"I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period." Steve Martin
"No matter how many times people say it—'Oh, I'm just writing this for myself' 'Oh, I'm just doing this for myself'—nobody's doing it for themselves! You're doing it for an audience. So whether I'm performing or writing a book or playing music, it's definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way, definitely." Steve Martin
"Some people have a way with words, and other people… oh, uh, not have way." Steve Martin
"The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready." Steve Martin
"Yeah, well, we're all writers, aren't we? He's a writer that hasn't been published, and I'm a writer who hasn't written anything." Steve Martin
"A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience." W. Somerset Maugham
"Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams." W. Somerset Maugham
"Books can’t matter much if their authors themselves don’t think they matter." W. Somerset Maugham
"Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy." W. Somerset Maugham
"Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous." W. Somerset Maugham
"I always found Dickens very coarse. I don't want to read about people who drop their aitches." W. Somerset Maugham
"I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written." W. Somerset Maugham
"I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp." W. Somerset Maugham
"If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write." W. Somerset Maugham
"It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is." W. Somerset Maugham
"It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer." W. Somerset Maugham
"Life is there to be lived rather than to be written about." W. Somerset Maugham
"The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected." W. Somerset Maugham
"The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success." W. Somerset Maugham
"The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you." W. Somerset Maugham
"The writer is more concerned to know than to judge." W. Somerset Maugham
"The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes." W. Somerset Maugham
"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." W. Somerset Maugham
"Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad." W. Somerset Maugham
"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life." W. Somerset Maugham
"To write simply is as difficult as to be good." W. Somerset Maugham
"We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to." W. Somerset Maugham
"We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby." W. Somerset Maugham
"What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably… have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature." W. Somerset Maugham
"When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me." W. Somerset Maugham
"With enough plain food to satisfy my small appetite, a room to myself, books from a public library, pens and paper, I should regret nothing." W. Somerset Maugham
"Writing is the supreme solace." W. Somerset Maugham
"You can never know enough about your characters." W. Somerset Maugham
"You cannot write unless you write much." W. Somerset Maugham
"Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story." Daphne du Maurier
"Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard." Daphne du Maurier
"All autobiography is self-indulgent." Daphne du Maurier
"And I don't like books which are full of name dropping." Daphne du Maurier
"When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person." Daphne du Maurier
"It's so much easier to think out vaguely in my head than to set it down in words." Daphne du Maurier
"Writing every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty… like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again." Daphne du Maurier
"I want the reader to hear with his eyes." Gregory McDonald
"Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life: it is a comprehensive response to life." Gregory McDonald
"Writing mysteries lets me get away with murder. I think 'the mystery' may be the greatest form for social criticism, simply because it is pedestrian." Gregory McDonald
"A novel, to be a novel, must be novel." Gregory McDonald
"Life without a Kindle is like life without a library nearby." Franz S. McLaren
"If you want to be a writer, then write." Brad Meltzer
"I played Little League for one year. That was it. Then my mother realized I liked books and threatened my father. I owe her forever for that." Brad Meltzer
"There is no better place to plot the death of a character than when you're miserable and working out." Brad Meltzer
"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it." Herman Melville
"Truth is in things, and not in words." Herman Melville
"It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open." Herman Melville
"I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb." Herman Melville
"Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters." Herman Melville
"For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books" Herman Melville
"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions." James A. Michener
"A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined." James A. Michener
"A novel… is a golden kettle into which you pour all of experience… You can toss in great chunks of meat and fragrant bones and stock left over from the meals before. You can add fragments of character or the whole man. You can have scenes that fill a quarter of the book and others that flash by in a fleeting glance. In a novel there's nothing you can't do, if you do it with passion." James A. Michener
"I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation." James A. Michener
"I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains." James A. Michener
"I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter." James A. Michener
"If you did not read when you were young, you might never catch the disease and then what would be the use of living?" James A. Michener
"If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it." James A. Michener
"Only a mind steeped in true love can write irony. The others write satire." James A. Michener
"Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually." James A. Michener
"The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants." James A. Michener
"The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination." James A. Michener
"Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don’t need you." James A. Michener
"When you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research." Wilson Mizner
"I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one." Marilyn Monroe
"Don't try to write anything you can't feel it will be a failure." L.M. Montgomery
"Steal not this book for fear of shame
For on it is the owner's name
And when you die the Lord will say
Where is the book you stole away
And when you say you do not know
The Lord will say go down below." L.M. Montgomery
"A plate of apples, an open fire, and a jolly good book are a fair substitute for heaven." L.M. Montgomery
"I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them." L.M. Montgomery
"I hate to lend a book I love… it never seems quite the same when it comes back to me… " L.M. Montgomery
"I love a book that makes me cry." L.M. Montgomery
"My pen shall heal, not hurt." L.M. Montgomery
"People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas, you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?" L.M. Montgomery
"Proverbs are all very fine when there's nothing to worry you, but when you're in real trouble, they're not a bit of help." L.M. Montgomery
"You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?" L.M. Montgomery
"Fiction is about characters that readers are intimately involved with and worried about." Jessica Page Morrell
"A writer's life and work are not a gift to humankind; they are its necessity." Toni Morrison
"An editor is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one then you are better off alone." Toni Morrison
"Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form." Toni Morrison
"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it." Toni Morrison
"Everything bad that ever happened to him happened because he couldn't read." Toni Morrison
"I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort." Toni Morrison
"I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it." Toni Morrison
"I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it." Toni Morrison
"I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it." Toni Morrison
"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." Toni Morrison
"If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic… Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage." Toni Morrison
"People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever." Toni Morrison
"Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers." Toni Morrison
"The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects." Toni Morrison
"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power." Toni Morrison
"The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book." Toni Morrison
"The writing is I'm free from pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing." Toni Morrison
"There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises… If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays." Toni Morrison
"When I write, I don't translate for white readers… Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me." Toni Morrison
"Write at the edges of the day." Toni Morrison
"Writing is really a way of thinking—not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet." Toni Morrison
"You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?" Toni Morrison
"You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up." Toni Morrison
"Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it." John Muir
"A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime." Haruki Murakami
"As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change." Haruki Murakami
"Every writer has his writing technique—what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing." Haruki Murakami
"I began running on an everyday basis after I became a writer. As being a writer requires sitting at a desk for hours a day, without getting some exercise you'd quickly get out of shape and gain weight, I figured." Haruki Murakami
"I could have been a cult writer if I'd kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book." Haruki Murakami
"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else." Haruki Murakami
"I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it." Haruki Murakami
"I don't know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five." Haruki Murakami
"I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run." Haruki Murakami
"I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn't have to write for my living." Haruki Murakami
"I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching." Haruki Murakami
"I like to read books. I like to listen to music." Haruki Murakami
"I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, "It's true. There aren't any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words." I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them." Haruki Murakami
"I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream—I was surprised to find it happening." Haruki Murakami
"I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love." Haruki Murakami
"I was enjoying myself writing, because I don't know what's going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don't know at all what you're going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you're a kid and you're reading stories." Haruki Murakami
"I'm a writer, not a professional runner. It's fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration." Haruki Murakami
"I'm a writer. I don't support any war. That's my principle." Haruki Murakami
"I'm not intelligent. I'm not arrogant. I'm just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn't want to become a writer—it just happened." Haruki Murakami
"If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong." Haruki Murakami
"In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness." Haruki Murakami
"In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way." Haruki Murakami
"In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories." Haruki Murakami
"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them. The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be." Haruki Murakami
"It's physical. If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong." Haruki Murakami
"Many people tell me that they don't know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That's good." Haruki Murakami
"Most near-future fictions are boring. It's always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy." Haruki Murakami
"Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside." Haruki Murakami
"Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so… I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games." Haruki Murakami
"Sometimes I wonder why I'm a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I'm a successful writer." Haruki Murakami
"That's how stories happen—with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story." Haruki Murakami
"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair." Haruki Murakami
"When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say." Haruki Murakami
"When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese." Haruki Murakami
"When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It's like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly." Haruki Murakami
"Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me." Haruki Murakami
"Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose)." Haruki Murakami
"With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy." Haruki Murakami
"You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical." Haruki Murakami
"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck." Iris Murdoch
"There is no one right way. Just figure out what works for you!" Lorii Myers
"I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers." Vladimir Nabokov
"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible." Vladimir Nabokov
"The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading." Vladimir Nabokov
"A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader." Vladimir Nabokov
"A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past." Vladimir Nabokov
"A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist." Vladimir Nabokov
"All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter." Vladimir Nabokov
"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child." Vladimir Nabokov
"Ink, a Drug." Vladimir Nabokov
"No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has." Vladimir Nabokov
"Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer." Vladimir Nabokov
"Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic." Vladimir Nabokov
"Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them." Vladimir Nabokov
"She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions." Vladimir Nabokov
"Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm." Vladimir Nabokov
"Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash." Vladimir Nabokov
"There is only one school of literature—that of talent." Vladimir Nabokov
"Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed." Vladimir Nabokov
"Words without experience are meaningless." Vladimir Nabokov
"Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time." Howard Nemerov
"A lot happens by accident in poetry." Howard Nemerov
"Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful." Howard Nemerov
"Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice." Howard Nemerov
"We're not in love with Literature all the time—especially when you have to teach it every day." Howard Nemerov
"When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had." Howard Nemerov
"When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do." Howard Nemerov
"All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down." Friedrich Nietzsche
"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends." Friedrich Nietzsche
"A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness." Friedrich Nietzsche
"All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking." Friedrich Nietzsche
"I am one thing, my writings are another." Friedrich Nietzsche
"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book." Friedrich Nietzsche
"Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood." Friedrich Nietzsche
"One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood." Friedrich Nietzsche
"The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak." Friedrich Nietzsche
"The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer." Friedrich Nietzsche
"The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole." Friedrich Nietzsche
"Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth." Friedrich Nietzsche
"A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise." Joyce Carol Oates
"I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don't have to get books repaired." Joyce Carol Oates
"I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written." Joyce Carol Oates
"The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written." Joyce Carol Oates
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." Flannery O'Connor
"I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one." Flannery O'Connor
"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location." Flannery O'Connor
"Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, send your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the end." Paul O'Neil
"It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning—it'll be gone." Mary Oliver
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." George Orwell
"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." George Orwell
"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." George Orwell
"Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing." George Orwell
"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper." George Orwell
"For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity." George Orwell
"Good novel are written by people who are not frightened." George Orwell
"I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life." George Orwell
"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." George Orwell
"In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money." George Orwell
"In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." George Orwell
"It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane." George Orwell
"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words." George Orwell
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." George Orwell
"Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers." George Orwell
"Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous." George Orwell
"Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever." George Orwell
"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature." George Orwell
"The best books…are those that tell you what you know already." George Orwell
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink." George Orwell
"The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity." George Orwell
"To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up." George Orwell
"When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing." George Orwell
"Writing a novel is agony." George Orwell
"I hate writing, I love having written." Dorothy Parker
"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy." Dorothy Parker
"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." Dorothy Parker
"Man is a slow, sloppy, and brilliant thinker; computers are fast, accurate, and stupid." John Pfeiffer
"Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working." Pablo Picasso
"Every year I tell myself that I'm not going to read any reviews and then I do. We're all human and when I read something negative it hurts. I think when you write it's part of the game, you're going to get some good reviews and some bad reviews and that's how it goes. I don't write for the reviews." Jodi Picoult
"Everyone has a book inside of them—but it doesn't do any good until you pry it out." Jodi Picoult
"Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets, lies, stories. We all tell them. Sometimes, because we hope to entertain. Sometimes, because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to." Jodi Picoult
"How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?" Jodi Picoult
"I don't believe in writer's block. Think about it—when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn't it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer's block is having too much time on your hands." Jodi Picoult
"I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes." Jodi Picoult
"I think the reason these readers come back to me is because I represent their points of view. It may not be my point of view, but that's OK. Everyone still deserves to have their say." Jodi Picoult
"I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction." Jodi Picoult
"I write about all the horrible things that can happen to kids as a way of keeping those things from happening to mine. Write the books, spit three times over your shoulder and you're safe." Jodi Picoult
"I write adult fiction, but a good 40 to 50 per cent of my readers are teenagers. I love that if they have to grow up and move past JK Rowling they can move to me. From Jo to Jodi!" Jodi Picoult
"I'm always writing, even when I'm not at my desk. I write on my hands. I used to write on my kids' hands, too, but they don't let me any more. When I'm driving I sometimes write all the way up my arms." Jodi Picoult
"If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it—by the non-reality—you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you." Jodi Picoult
"If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading." Jodi Picoult
"Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true." Jodi Picoult
"Most people in America want an easy read. I call it McFiction—books which pass right through you without you even digesting them. I don't mean a book that has two-syllable words. I mean chapters you can read in a toilet break. Happy endings. We are more of a TV culture." Jodi Picoult
"That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?" Jodi Picoult
"The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home." Jodi Picoult
"The act of writing… is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that's the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books." Jodi Picoult
"The best thing about endings is knowing that just ahead is the daunting task to start over." Jodi Picoult
"There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success." Jodi Picoult
"When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens." Jodi Picoult
"When she wanted to escape her life, she read books." Jodi Picoult
"When you're stuck, and sure you've written absolutely garbage, force yourself to finish and then decide to fix or scrap it—or you will never know if you can." Jodi Picoult
"Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall." Jodi Picoult
"Words are like nets—we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder." Jodi Picoult
"Writer's block is for people who have the luxury of time." Jodi Picoult
"You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page." Jodi Picoult
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." Sylvia Plath
"I am a writer… I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name." Sylvia Plath
"I love my rejection slips. They show me I try." Sylvia Plath
"I must be lean and write and make worlds beside this to live in." Sylvia Plath
"I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue - rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego." Sylvia Plath
"I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head." Sylvia Plath
"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing." Sylvia Plath
"Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow." Sylvia Plath
"Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to." Sylvia Plath
"The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." Sylvia Plath
"Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.' " Sylvia Plath
"When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing." Enrique Jardiel Poncela
"Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys." Gail Pool
"There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you." Beatrix Potter
"Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling 'banana', but didn't know how you stopped." Terry Pratchett
"Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it, and above all, accurately, so they will be guided by its light." Joseph Pulitzer
"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world." Philip Pullman
"All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions." Philip Pullman
"All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?" Philip Pullman
"And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?" Philip Pullman
"For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence." Philip Pullman
"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer." Philip Pullman
"I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read." Philip Pullman
"If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day." Philip Pullman
"My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing." Philip Pullman
"Read like a butterfly, write like a bee." Philip Pullman
"She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs." Philip Pullman
"Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all." Philip Pullman
"The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you’re better off not touching it until you’re all grown up. I’m going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don’t open it.' " Philip Pullman
"The question authors get asked more than any other is 'Where do you get your ideas from?' And we all find a way of answering which we hope isn't arrogant or discouraging. What I usually say is 'I don't know where they come from, but I know where they come to: they come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.' " Philip Pullman
"There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book." Philip Pullman
"There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them." Philip Pullman
"We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. 'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever." Philip Pullman
"What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism." Philip Pullman
"What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose." Philip Pullman