Quotes to inspire and reflect

Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many' circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.

Even after you’ve won fame and fortune, every time you write you’ve got to write, there’s no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.

[A] life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

Writing the last page of a book was as close as he’d ever come to sublimity, and that hadn’t happened in four years.

In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses—the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you?

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age.

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.

All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.

I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.

No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.

’Tis easy to write epigrams nicely, but to write a book is hard.

i never think at all when i write / nobody can do two things at the same time / and do them both well.

If you once understand an author’s character, the comprehension of his writings becomes easy.

To make a book is as much a trade as to make a clock; something more than intelligence is required to become an author.

The great authors share their souls with us— “literally.”

It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all.

The same common sense which makes an author write good things, makes him dread they are not good enough to deserve reading.

A mediocre mind thinks it writes divinely; a good mind thinks it writes reasonably.

An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many and grows old with their sick hearts.

The fact that many people should be shocked by what he writes practically imposes it as a duty upon the writer to go on shocking them.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.

Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

Even monarchs have need of authors, and fear their pens more than ugly women the painter’s pencil.

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.

A writer’s life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian.

A writer’s desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he’s read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.

He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

In good writing, words become one with things.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

A poem, a sentence, causes us to see ourselves. I be, and I see my being, at the same time.

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

1 tried to write worse but it was no good; my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged.

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the marketplace.

The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty—the sideshow of second thoughts—is his rule; he offers himself.

If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that.