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Writers are the main landmarks of the past.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
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Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.
-Julie Burchill
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Readers of the twenty-first chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably know or is really a discardable limb. I meant the book to end in this way, but my aesthetic judgement may have been faulty. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics. 'Quod scripsi scripsi' said Pontius Pilate when he made Jesus Christ the King of the Jews. 'What I have written I have Written.' We can destroy what we have written but we cannot unwrite it. I leave what I wrote with what Dr. Johnson called frigid indifference to the judgement of that .00000001 of the American population which cares about such things. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
-Anthony Burgess, November, 1986
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If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.
-Anthony Burgess
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Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
-Anthony Burgess
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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
-Anthony Burgess
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I look better, feel better, make love better and I'll tell you something else....I never lied better.
-George Burns
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Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his so-called life. 'And we (will) all die and the stars will go out, one after another.'
-William S. Burroughs
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In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas. . . a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
-William S. Burroughs
Remark, 1964. Quoted in: Eric Mottram, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1977).
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The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
-Samuel Butler
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But I hate things all fiction... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric -- and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Romances I never read like those I have seen.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler, see what I am, and what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, and what language I have been obliged to treat them with to deal with them in their own way; -- all this comes of Authorship.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
-Italo Calvino
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The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
-Elias Canetti
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I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
-Truman Capote
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To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.
-Truman Capote
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Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
-Truman Capote
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Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole -- so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
-Willa Cather
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
-Willa Cather
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Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
-Willa Cather
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Books about Authors & Writing
