An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON WRITING 2
If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner (1897-1962, American novelist)
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
William Faulkner (1897-1962, American novelist)
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
William Faulkner (1897-1962, American novelist)
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner (1897-1962, American novelist)
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Edna Ferber (1887-1968, American author)
Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
Edna Ferber (1887-1968, American author)
Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.
Edna Ferber (1887-1968, American author)
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940, American writer) Author's website: www.fitzgeraldsociety.org
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940, American writer) Author's website: www.fitzgeraldsociety.org
Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940, American writer) Author's website: www.fitzgeraldsociety.org
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer and more meager.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940, American writer) Author's website: www.fitzgeraldsociety.org
Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940, American writer) Author's website: www.fitzgeraldsociety.org
You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940, American writer) Author's website: www.fitzgeraldsociety.org
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
Edward M. Forster (1879-1970, British novelist, essayist)
The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.
Gene Fowler (1890-1960, American journalist, biographer)
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler (1890-1960, American journalist, biographer)
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939, Austrian physician, founder of Psychoanalysis)
It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794, British historian)
The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794, British historian)
Every author in some degree portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist)
He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist)
If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist)
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.
William Golding (1911-1993, British author)
You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
Ellen Goodman
The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity; of Spencer, remoteness; of Milton, elevation; and of Shakespeare, everything.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830, British essayist)
A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.
George Gribbon
I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect; I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.
Sir Peter Hall
He has the common feeling of his profession. He enjoys a statement twice as much if it appears in fine print, and anything that turns up in a footnote... takes on the character of divine revelation.
Margaret Halsey (1910-1997, American author)
Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word.
Gail Hamilton (1833-1896, American writer, humorist)
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.
Peter Handke
The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.
Vaclav Havel (1936-, Czech playwright, president)
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.
Lillian Hellman (1905-1984, American playwright)
A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
Oliver Herford (1863-1935, American author, illustrator)
The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894, American author, wit, poet)
Good sense is both the first principle and the parent source of good writing.
Horace (BC 65-8, Italian poet)
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.
Horace (BC 65-8, Italian poet)
One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.
Horace (BC 65-8, Italian poet)
The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.
Horace (BC 65-8, Italian poet)
You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.
Horace (BC 65-8, Italian poet)
You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.
Horace (BC 65-8, Italian poet)
The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness.
Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910, American feminist, reformer, writer)
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
Joseph Joubert (1754-1824, French moralist)
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
Joseph Joubert (1754-1824, French moralist)
A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.
John K. Hutchens
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
Henry James (1843-1916, American author)
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James (1843-1916, American author)
Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
James Joyce (1882-1941, Irish author)
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
Ken Kesey
The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.
Omar Khayyam (1048-1131, Persian astronomer, poet)
People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.
Stephen King (1947-, American horror writer, actor)
I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.
George Konrad (1933-, Hungarian writer, politician)
A journalist is stimulated by a deadline: He writes worse when he has time.
Karl Kraus (1874-1936, Austrian satirist)
This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.
Karl Kraus (1874-1936, Austrian satirist)
It requires more than mere genius to be an author.
Jean De La Bruyere (1645-1696, French classical writer)
We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
Cecil Day Lewis
The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864, British poet, essayist)
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930, British author)
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
Jack Lemmon (1925-, American actor)
The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.
Inigo de Leon
The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.
Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-, French anthropologist)
As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.
Georg C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799, German physicist, satirist)
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
Georg C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799, German physicist, satirist)
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
Abbott Joseph Liebling (1904-1963, American journalist)
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Norman Mailer (1923-, American author)
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer (1923-, American author)
The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.
Paul De Man (1919-1983, Belgian-born American literary critic)
The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
Paul De Man (1919-1983, Belgian-born American literary critic)
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both, you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-, Colombian writer)
I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.
Don Marquis (1878-1937, American humorist, journalist)
If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
Judith Martin
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
Groucho Marx (1895-1977, American comic actor)
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Karl Marx (1818-1883, German political theorist, social philosopher)
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965, British novelist, playwright)
It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965, British novelist, playwright)
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965, British novelist, playwright)
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965, British novelist, playwright)
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965, British novelist, playwright)
The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.
Andre Maurois (1885-1967, French writer)
You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
Ian McEwan (1948-, British author)
You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.
Larry McMurtry (1936-, American screenwriter, novelist, essayist)
Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!
Herman Melville (1819-1891, American author)
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