Top 100 Literature Writing Quotes
#1. I think that I had better go, Holmes."
"Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#2. I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times.
Bill Styron
#3. It's very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that's something that resonates for me.
Tom McCarthy
#4. I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
#5. Speech is the body part of thinking, the voice of the mind. Writing is the blood and mind mixing to speak through the fingers, through the hands.
Lenora Champagne
#6. Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.
C.V. Wedgwood
#7. Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.
Haruki Murakami
#8. In a way, 'Billy Elliot' was autobiographical. I can't dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.
Lee Hall
#9. I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.
Sam Weller
#10. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Ernest Hemingway,
#12. 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
#13. Written words, if carefully laid down, represent the civilized ideal of reason.
Brian Herbert
#14. Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
Bernard Berenson
#15. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.
Harold Bloom
#16. A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
Northrop Frye
#17. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.
Annie Dillard
#18. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#19. You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
Ray Bradbury
#20. 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
#21. The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#22. I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#23. If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.
Cynthia Ozick
#24. Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.
Georges Bataille
#25. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H Gass
#26. I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it.
Isabel Allende
#27. I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
Clifford Geertz
#28. I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]
Maxwell Perkins
#29. Work from your own side of literature/ & room fetish, not "publishing's" -
Jack Kerouac
#30. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
Junot Diaz
#31. The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.
Minae Mizumura
#32. This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora's work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.
Alice Walker
#33. Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.
Stieg Larsson
#34. 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
#35. I don't want to take up literature in a money-making spirit, or be very anxious about making large profits, but selling it at a loss is another thing altogether, and an amusement I cannot well afford.
Lewis Carroll
#36. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called "writing." Writing is more about destroying than creating.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#37. We speak about understanding each other, having those conversations nationwide - culturally, historically - and yet there's a lot of gaps. So I want to assist with closing the gap of knowing about and hearing about our Latino communities in terms of literature, in terms of writing.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#38. I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense ... But it's unquestionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.
Georgette Heyer
#39. No doubts our generation is producing another form of grub street literature.. Welcome to the world of hack writers..
Himmilicious
#40. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#41. Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.
Wendell Phillips
#44. Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.
Joan Didion
#45. We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.
Harold Bloom
#46. Any experience, which is not written, will be lost in time. Rich literature is lost forever.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#47. If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn't write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
#48. This is my last communique from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature's bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published.
Roberto Bolano
#49. To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
Nelson Algren
#50. I wanted to write literature that pushed people into their lives rather than helping people escape from them.
Harvey Pekar
#51. I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#52. How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line - how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined - well, a good poem.
Ashley Hay
#53. Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.
Ren Garcia
#54. This is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity ... You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#55. If you have a big heart, you will live a large life.
Yvonne Jayne
#56. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me.
Bill Hicks
#57. He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
Stephen King
#58. If you're going to fall in love with anyone, fall in love with a writer. Allow yourself to become immortalised in words.
Jamie L. Harding
#59. Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.
Graham Moore
#60. Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Oscar Wilde
#61. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.
Jamie L. Harding
#62. I went to school to study literature and writing, even though I didn't end up really doing that in the end.
Gaby Hoffmann
#63. The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business - all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).
Daniel J. Levitin
#64. Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
Witold Gombrowicz
#65. The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.
Jon Spaihts
#67. There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.
Eduardo Galeano
#68. I don't want my writing to be work to read. My main goal is completely shameless entertainment. I want people to smile and giggle and enjoy the book. I'm not trying to save the world through literature.
Gail Carriger
#69. I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally. For me literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is.
Barbara Christian
#71. When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#72. I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.
Naguib Mahfouz
#73. Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#74. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
Mary Gordon
#75. Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Julian Barnes
#77. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.
Margaret Atwood
#78. I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.
Dorothy Allison
#79. To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.
Gao Xingjian
#80. Writers, that deep dark secret is not something you should hide from the world. It is your gift. Take it from memory and illuminate it in literature,shake the dust from it, unless it will get you arrested, lol.
Kevin R. Hill
#81. When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.
Jonathan Franzen
#82. There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.
Jules Renard
#83. I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.
Sherman Alexie
#84. It perhaps might be said
if any one dared
that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.
Stephen Crane
#86. 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
#87. I think literature totally fails when it has an agenda. - From an interview on the podcast Starship Sofa, December 2010.
Connie Willis
#88. The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.
Gerald Brenan
#89. Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.
Robert McKee
#90. When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.
George Saintsbury
#91. A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.
Munia Khan
#92. Literature, the act of writing, affirms life, however dark the story it tells.
Marty Rubin
#93. Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.
James Wood
#94. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Cyril Connolly
#95. When we've decided to tell the truth in a story, we should tell good, strong versions of it, proper versions that kids can do something with.
Celine Kiernan
#96. The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.
V.S. Pritchett
#97. I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.
Robert Stone
#98. The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable.
Kate Zambreno
#99. No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We've got too many dexterous drudges as it is.
Jan Neruda
#100. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger
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