Top 37 Authorship Writing Quotes
#1. Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.
[Interview, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009]
Cormac McCarthy
#2. Somebody told me I'm a writer. I believed them. Now I regret it.
Stefanos Livos
#3. The precise metaphysical procedures by which a book goes about writing another book need not concern us here. Suffice to say that our human scribes remain entirely ignorant of their possession by bibliographic forces; the agent in question never doubts that his authorship is authentic.
James K. Morrow
#5. I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.
Tanith Lee
#6. I have observed that vulgar readers almost always lose their veneration for the writings of the genius with whom they have had personal intercourse.
Egerton Brydges
#7. After the third [San Miguel], I am likely to announce that all writing is fantasy anyway: that to set any event down in print is immediately to begin to lie about it, thank goodness; and that it's no less absurd and presumptuous to try on the skin of a bank teller than that of a Bigfoot or a dragon.
Peter S. Beagle
#8. If there's a will, there's a way!
I feel larger than LIFE
and look up to the stars who shine down on me and have become my own personal cheerleaders ... as my fingers tap on my computer late into the night..
Donna Scrima-Black
#9. True authors don't write for fame or to make a name or money, they write to make impact
Bernard Kelvin Clive
#10. From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views.
- Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic
Arthur Conan Doyle
#11. [Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so.
Samuel Beckett
#12. Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!
Henry James
#13. I had been working hard at my book; it was one of those rare days of authorship when everything seemed to go right; the words flowed unbidden from my pen, and the time had passed unheeded, so that it was a shock to realise that I had been writing for some six hours.
Gavin Maxwell
#14. When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
Stephen King
#16. 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 Byron
#17. Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress truth.
Wole Soyinka
#18. Each day hands me a clean sheet of paper upon which to write. Therefore, I would be wise to write without ever having the need to erase.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#19. No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#20. Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.
Ngaio Marsh
#21. Very often human beings don't become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity.
Christopher Morley
#22. I have had my say, as he wished. Now the book belongs, as he points out, to the world he claims to speak for.
Julian Darius
#24. For authors, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line only if you are writing the letter I.
Michael A. Arnzen
#25. We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#26. You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.
Dave Eggers
#27. Why I love these words
They are mine
You cannot change that
You cannot rearrange that
Try as you might
You cannot take away
All that they mean to me
Maddy Kobar
#28. I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.
Breece D'J Pancake
#29. Often turn the stile [correct with care], if you expect to write anything worthy of being read twice.
[Lat., Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint Scripturus.]
Horace
#31. A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#32. We do not wait for inspiration. We work because we've jolly well got to. But when all is said and done, we toil at this particular job because it's turned out to be our particular job, and in a weird sort of way I suppose we may be said to like it.
Ngaio Marsh
#33. That's the thing about writers -on one hand evrything is sacred to them, but, on the other, nothing really is.
Lang Leav
#34. Brevity in writing is
what charity is to all other virtues - righteousness is nothing
without the one,
nor authorship without the other.
Sydney Smith
#35. Writing to please all tastes is like cooking without seasoning...
Nanette L. Avery
#36. Some people have a lot of time, but no money--
It's because they don't work hard enough.
Some people have a lot of money, but no time--
It's because they don't work smart enough.
The most successful people have both.
Bob Sharpe
#37. I grow more and more intrigued by this as I write: how words, even the most carefully chosen, can mean such different things from one person to another, so that others might think about what I write in ways I did not intend at all.
Dawn Hammill
