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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
-James Baldwin
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We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
-J. G. Ballard
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The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature; only then can he see clearly.
-Julian Barnes
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Novels are longer than life.
-Natalie Clifford Barney
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To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.
-Roland Barthes
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On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.
-Jean Baudrillard
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When I am dead, I hope it is said,
'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read'.
-Hilaire Belloc
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Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing
-Hilaire Belloc
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All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
-Saul Bellow
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It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I coudn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
-Robert Benchley
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The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
-Robert Benchley
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It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.
-Robert Benchley
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The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
-Robert Benchley
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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
-Walter Benjamin
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright. But I'm not.
-Alan Bennett
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Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
-Arnold Bennett
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Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
-Thomas Berger
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Let me tell you what a writer is. A writer takes comprehensive views, holds large convictions, makes wide generalizations. A writer's not English, Mexican, or American. A writer's not a woman nor a man. A writer's not Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, nor snake worshipper. To local standards of right and wrong a writer's civilly indifferent. In the virtues, a writer's concerned only with general expediency. A writer doesn't waste time focusing on fixed moral principles that aren't yet before the court of conscience. Happiness discloses itself to a writer as the end and purpose of life, and art and love are the only means to a writer's happiness. A writer is free of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, and politics. To a writer, a continent doesn't seem long, nor a century wide. And a writer has ever present consciousness that this is a world of...fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions, and frothing mad.
-Ambrose Bierce
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A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.
-Maurice Blanchot
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To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.
-Maurice Blanchot
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The work was like peeling an onion. The outer skin came off with difficulty... but in no time you'd be down to its innards, tears streaming from your eyes as more and more beautiful reductions became possible.
-Edward Blishen
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No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write.
-Nicholas Boileau
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He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.
-Nicholas Boileau
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The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.
-Daniel J. Boorstin
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Books about Authors & Writing
