Famous Authors and Their Writing
Agatha Christie
“You
start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of
confidence. If you are properly modest, you will never write at all, so
there has to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something,
know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start
in exercise book buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into
difficulties, don’t see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish
more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing
confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know it is absolutely
rotten. A couple of months later you wonder if it may not be all right
after all.”
Albert Camus
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
Albert Einstein
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
Alfred Hitchcock
“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”
Allen Ginsberg
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.”
André Gide
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
Andrew Carnegie
“People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.”
Anne Frank
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.”
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Anne Sexton
“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
Anthony Burgess
“Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.”
Arthur C. Clarke
“If the artist did not know his goal, even the most miraculous of tools could not find it for him.”
Arthur Conan Doyle
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
Arthur Miller
“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”
Bob Dylan
“Get
outside. Get out into the world, man! You wanna read poetry, look at
the stars. Light a candle and write under the new moon. That’s when The
Operator comes to whisper the Secret Words to you.”
Carl Jung
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Carl Sandburg
“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.”
Charles Bukowski
“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”
Charles Dickens
“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.”
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Charles M. Schulz
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, look to tomorrow, rest this afternoon.”
C. S. Lewis
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
Dalton Trumbo
“When one many says, “No, I won’t,” Rome begins to fear.”
Damon Runyon
“A person who asks questions can get a reputation such as a person who wishes to find things out.”
Daphne Du Maurier
“Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.”
Dylan Thomas
“A
good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same
once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the
shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself
and the world around him.”
E. B. White
“Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don’t write about Man, write about a man.”
Edith Wharton
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
Edward Albee
“Good
writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns
fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the
opposite.”
Edward Gorey
“If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.”
Elmore Leonard
“1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10.
Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. My most important
rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it
.”
Emil Cioran
“I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.”
Émile Zola
“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”
Eric Carle
“Let’s
put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20
word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word
novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000
words and I reduce it to 20.”
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Ernest Hemingway
“Never
compete with living writers. You don’t know whether they’re good or
not. Compete with the dead ones you know are good. Then when you can
pass them up you know you’re going good. You should have read all the
good stuff so that you know what has been done, because if you have a
story like one somebody else has written, yours isn’t any good unless
you can write a better one. In any art you’re allowed to steal anything
if you can make it better, but the tendency should always be upward
instead of down. And don’t ever imitate anybody.”
Ezra Pound
“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The
test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed
ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to
function.”
Frederick Douglass
“It
is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but
thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
G. K. Chesterton
“Fairy
tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know
that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”
George Bernard Shaw
“My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.”
George Orwell
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
George Plimpton
“As anyone who listens to speeches knows, brevity is an asset.”
Georges Simenon
“The
fact that we are I don’t know how many millions of people, yet
communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between
two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the
world.”
Read more great writing advice from Georges Simenon.
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
Gore Vidal
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”
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Hans Christian Andersen
“Enjoy life. There’s plenty of time to be dead.”
Harlan Ellison
“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”
Harper Lee (with Truman Capote)
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Since
I began this note I have been called off at least a dozen times — once
for the fish-man, to buy a codfish — once to see a man who had brought
me some baskets of apples — once to see a book man…then to nurse the
baby — then into the kitchen to make chowder for dinner and now I am at
it again for nothing but deadly determination enables me to ever write —
it is rowing against wind and tide.”
Heinrich Böll
“It’s true and it’s easily said that language is material, and something does materialize as one writes.”
Henry Miller
“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.”
H. L. Mencken
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
Hunter S. Thompson
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Ian Fleming
“Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes,’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.”
J. D. Salinger
“The
mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause,
while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
Jack Kerouac
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
Jack London
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
Jackie Kennedy
“The
deep desire to inspire people, to take an active part in the life of
the country… We should all do something to right the wrongs that we see
and not just complain about them.”
James Baldwin
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
James Patterson
“In
my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the
room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are
almost done. Some I’m rewriting. If I’m working with a co-writer,
they’ll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent
drafts.”
Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne
“I
write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what
I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear… We tell ourselves
stories in order to live.”
John Cheever
“The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.”
John F. Kennedy
“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”
John Fante
“For
your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind
before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on
something you don’t believe in yourself.”
John Steinbeck
“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
John Updike
“You
cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take
it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of
thumbprints on it.”
Joseph Brodsky
“It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.”
J. R. R. Tolkien
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
Karen Blixen
“The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.”
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Katherine Anne Porter
“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“The
arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of
making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or
badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.”
Leo Tolstoy
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
Louisa May Alcott
“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.”
Margaret Mitchell
“The world can forgive practically anything except people who mind their own business.”
Mark Twain
“Substitute
‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very.’ Your editor will
delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
Marlon Brando
“Regret is useless in life. It’s in the past. All we have is now.”
Max Frisch
“It’s precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.”
Michel Foucault
“My job is making windows where there were once walls.”
Mickey Spillane
“If
you’re a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A
writer gets more knowledge, and if he’s good, the older he gets, the
better he writes.”
Neil Gaiman
“A
freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages
in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of
your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle
that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or
money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred
things for every bottle that winds up coming back.”
Nigella Lawson
“It’s
true that I wouldn’t have written the first book had my sister and
mother been alive. It was my way of continuing our conversation.”
Oliver Sacks
“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
Orson Welles
“If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”
Patricia Highsmith
“Obsessions are the only things that matter.”
P. G. Wodehouse
“Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.”
Philip Pullman
“We
don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we
need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but
Once upon a time lasts forever.”
Philip Roth
“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
Pier Paolo Pasolini
“An
artist, if he’s unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest.
Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what
is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable
with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because
opening his mouth is always scandalous.”
Ramón Gómez de la Serna
“Writing is that they let you cry and laugh alone.”
Ray Bradbury
“Don’t
think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and
anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply
must do things…. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot
destroy you.”
Raymond Carver
“You’ve got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?”
Roald Dahl
“A
person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute
freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is
why he does it.”
Robert Frost
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
Roberto Calasso
“Stories never live alone; They are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward.”
Rudyard Kipling
“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.”
Saul Bellow
“A writer is a reader moved to emulation.”
Shuzo Takiguchi
“Now the globe suffers from severe nostalgia…”
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Simone de Beauvoir
“Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”
Somerset Maugham
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
Stephen King
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
Read more great writing advice from Stephen King.
Susan Sontag
“My library is an archive of longings.”
Sylvia Plath
“Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”
Ted Kooser
“Considering
the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong
with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a
significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While
you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world. And
I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which people actually took time to
think about what they were saying? It would be, I’m certain, a more
peaceful, more reasonable place. I don’t think there could ever be too
many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail
miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say ‘We loved the earth but
could not stay.”
Tennessee Williams
“When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“I
don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity
the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he
may regard himself as being.”
Truman Capote
“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
T.S. Eliot
“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea
.”
Vera and Vladimir Nabokov
“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
Virginia Woolf
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
W. Somerset Maugham
(I know I already shared a WSM pic, but I couldn’t resist the dog!)
“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
Wallace Stegner
“Hard writing makes easy reading.”
Walt Whitman
“The
secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the
moment — to put things down without deliberation — without worrying
about their style — without waiting for a fit time or place. I always
worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep,
the first desk, and wrote — wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the
very heartbeat of life is caught.”
William F. Buckley Jr.
“I
get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is
being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been
sitting on my ass all afternoon.”
William Faulkner
“Always
dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to
be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better
than yourself.”
William S. Burroughs
“Yes,
for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an
escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.”
Winston Churchill
“Writing
a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy then an amusement.
Then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then it
becomes a tyrant and, in the last stage, just as you are about to be
reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the
public.”
Bravery bonus: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
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