Top 100 Literary Writing Quotes
#1. When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
#2. All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
John Banville
#3. George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
Atul Gawande
#4. It is from him, from Beolco Ruzzante, that I've learned to free myself from conventional literary writing and to express myself with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing, even with the rambling nonsense-speech of the 'grammelot.'
Dario Fo
#5. Well I don't feel sectarian against sparseness, although I sometimes get a little chippy about this. I resent the way that a certain notion of parsimony has become the norm for skilful literary writing.
China Mieville
#6. I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#7. I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#8. Forget ideas, Mr. Author.
What kind of pen do you use?
Stephen Fry
#9. I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.
Isabel Allende
#10. [Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!
Terry Pratchett
#11. The literary man has a circle of the chosen few who read him and become his only public ... What more natural than that he should write for those who, even if they do not pay him, at least understand him?
Amado Nervo
#12. Anuj Bahari has always been a really good literary agent for me. What a good agent does is that he manages many of your business aspects so you can keep your time free for writing.
Amish Tripathi
#13. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Marilyn Hacker
#14. No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.
Sophie Hannah
#15. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Bertolt Brecht
#16. The charm of your writing," Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, "depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.
Nancy Mitford
#17. When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.
Daniel Alarcon
#18. A literary agent is nothing but a cheap salesman (or woman); while a writer is a cheap salesman (or woman) who also has to actually write the books.
John Hodgman
#19. [A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.
G.K. Chesterton
#20. (Feedback) People become addicted to it. That's why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
Zadie Smith
#21. Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.
W. H. Auden
#22. Your understanding and interpretation of [a novel] is undoubtedly unique ... and that is the real beauty of the relationship that joins readers, books and writers together in a literary trinity - a bookish triumvirate.
Briar Kit Esme
#23. Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.
Paul Gauguin
#24. When I finally find that one willing agent, I'll have found my prize in the Cracker Jack box.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#25. Of course the play as I wrote it amounted to nothing; but in weaving the plot through successive scenes, and in writing out some of the dialogues, I enjoyed the full bliss of literary creation. Never to have tasted this delight is never to have known one of the greatest joys of life.
Carl Schurz
#26. A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.
Floyd Skloot
#27. Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.
Flannery O'Connor
#28. Three Rules for Literary Success: 1. Read a lot.
2. Write a lot. 3. Read a lot more, write a lot more.
Robert Silverberg
#29. Could a literary life be referred to with the iambic pentameter of, say, harnessing wind power, transplanting hearts or saving the whales. Or did it necessitate the sombre and monotonous dirge of software, priority banking or turbine building.
Anita Nair
#30. If possible, I'd like to avoid that kind of literary burnout. My idea of literature is something more spontaneous, more cohesive, something with a kind of natural, positive vitality. For me, writing a novel is like climbing a steep mountain, struggling up the face of the cliff,
Haruki Murakami
#31. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.
Michelle Tea
#32. The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.
Nick Harkaway
#33. Suspense doesn't always have to be about physical danger. Making the reader worry is a universal concept that can be applied to any story.
Sandy Vaile
#34. One thing I knew about the novelist's task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.
Philip Sington
#35. Hone your writing skills as if they were your finest weapons of war. For in the literary arena, your pen will truly be your sword.
Max Hawthorne
#36. He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.
Robert Cormier
#37. The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
H.L. Mencken
#38. Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
Sara Sheridan
#39. What works for me is that I read widely and stay focused on my writing. I'm no longer concerned about what happens in the literary marketplace. It is distracting and can lead to discontent.
Sefi Atta
#40. I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go back for my writing.'
Susan Minot
#41. The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
Wilkie Collins
#42. I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.
Dana Spiotta
#43. I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.
Shelley Berman
#44. Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate.
Ayn Rand
#45. Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, "Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I'll write Ulysses."
Philip Pullman
#46. To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
Nelson Algren
#47. I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.
Siri Hustvedt
#48. I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing.
Khaled Hosseini
#49. England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.
William S. Burroughs
#51. To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don't have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be.
John Braine
#52. Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.
Edna O'Brien
#53. The dilemma for women - writing after everything else was finished - has prevented women from reaching their literary potential for centuries.
Joan M. Drury
#55. Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
Patrick White
#56. I write across several genres. I'm a slut for words. I can't keep it in my literary pants.
Fierce Dolan
#57. Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.
Gunter Grass
#58. I've always taken that as my guiding principle and the rest is just set dressing. You can have dragons in it, or aliens and starships, or a western about a gunslinger, or even literary fiction, and ultimately you're still writing about the human heart in conflict with itself.
George R R Martin
#59. The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.
Robert Dessaix
#60. I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.
Catherine Lowell
#61. There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.
Anne Lamott
#62. I resisted children's writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids' books.
Ellen Potter
#63. I don't just want a gripping story line. I shoot for the three dimensional literary Braille to a silent Scorsese movie
Carl Henegan
#64. Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.
Edward Fahey
#65. Give the villagers village arithmetic, village geography, village history and the literary knowledge that they must use daily, i.e. reading and writing letters, etc.
Mahatma Gandhi
#66. Write for joy. It is the *only* reason to write. Whatever happens to your books afterward, just write for joy. Send your current one out when it's done and forget it, start another, and keep on writing for joy. Words I now live by. Welwyn Wilton Katz
Welwyn Wilton Katz
#67. Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.
Pierre Janet
#68. Maurice Kenny stands at the forefront of his generation. Few writers of any ethnicity are destined to be remembered in the mainstream of literary history; I believe that Kenny's contributions as a poet are among those few. He writes from the center, as our Elders would say.
Wendy Rose
#69. {Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own.
Norman Lock
#70. Since I make my living as a literary journalist, not a book scout, I spend inordinate amounts of time either reading or writing.
Michael Dirda
#71. I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
Anne Enright
#72. I think my cheerfulness keeps my writing from sinking into the depths of melancholy, while the darker side keeps in check any literary silliness I might be inclined toward.
David Starkey
#73. I'm working when I'm fighting with my wife. I constantly ask myself-how can I use this stuff to literary advantage.
Art Buchwald
#74. It's not about fancy literary prizes. It's not about seeming impenetrable or smart or high fallutin. I'm not trying to impress anyone. I am trying to make you feel a story, that's all.
Maggie Stiefvater
#75. Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.
James Shapiro
#76. I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.
Hanya Yanagihara
#77. A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.
Aldous Huxley
#78. When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.
Paul Theroux
#79. In this age where people can become famous without doing anything, we are now encouraging a literary and publishing atmosphere where you must become famous before you can do anything.
Daniel R. Thorne
#80. You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.
H.L. Mencken
#81. It was terrifying, liberating, and risky. But one day I woke up and decided to try it." (On writing her first novel, "Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society")
Amy Hill Hearth
#82. I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing ... is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this - the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea.
Harper Lee
#83. I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.
William Monahan
#84. Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.
Gore Vidal
#85. Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
Donald Hall
#86. Ancient writing was intended to do things, to make people act or believe or change their behavior, not just to entertain them with a suitably concluded literary experience.
Mary Ann Tolbert
#87. People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing ... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip.
Lorrie Moore
#88. A few hints as to literary craftsmanship may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!
Samuel Eliot Morison
#89. As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.
Kurt Vonnegut
#90. Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.
Bess Streeter Aldrich
#91. I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.
Samuel Johnson
#92. All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.
Michael Stutz
#93. We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#94. As an outsider I was free to pick my own literary traditions, to build my own system of literary values.
Dubravka Ugresic
#95. [N]o such thing as objective writing, ... every inscription, every traveler's tale, every news account, every piece of technical writing, tells more about the author and his time than it does about the ostensible subject.
Sue Hubbell
#96. The literary world is made up of little confederacies, each looking upon its own members as the lights of the universe; and considering all others as mere transient meteors, doomed to soon fall and be forgotten, while its own luminaries are to shine steadily into immortality.
Washington Irving
#97. You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I'm telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren't reading it.
Kenneth Goldsmith
#98. Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'
Jeffrey Eugenides
#99. If she did experience sex
or something close to it
in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.
Haruki Murakami
#100. Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.
John Dufresne
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