Writing Quotes

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth'' is less important than emotional sincerity.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.