 
|
There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
|
|
A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!
-Hans Magnus Enzensberger
|
|
|
|
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
-Clifton Fadiman
|
|
|
|
There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
-Clifton Fadiman
|
|
|
|
The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.
-John Farrar
|
|
|
|
There's one good kind of writer -- a dead one.
-James T. Farrell
|
|
|
|
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
-William Faulkner
|
|
|
|
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
-William Faulkner
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
-William Faulkner
|
|
|
|
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
-William Faulkner
|
|
|
|
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html
-William Faulkner
speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950
|
|
|
|
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.
-Edna Ferber
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.
-Edna Ferber
|
|
|
|
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
|
|
|
|
When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
|
|
|
|
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks if I knew he could hear me. Praised may he be for not creating me a cotton merchant, a vaudevillian, or a wit.
-Gustave Flaubert
|
|
|
|
The author should be in his work like God is in the universe--present everywhere and visible nowhere.
L'auteur dans son oeuvre doit etre comme Dieu dans l'univers, present partout et visible nulle part.
-Gustave Flaubert
|
|
|
|
The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
|
|
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
|
|
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
-Gene Fowler
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
-Janet Frame
|
|
Books about Authors & Writing
