Quotes about writing and writers

"A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure." - Thoreau, Henry David

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." - Bach, Richard

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Mann, Thomas

"A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer." - Kraus, Karl

"A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others." - Rosten, Leo

"Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman." - Smith, Nancy Banks

"An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children." - Disraeli, Benjamin

"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent." - Baldwin, James

"As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word." - Lichtenberg, Georg C.

"Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon." - Zinsser, William

"Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened." - Orwell, George

"He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer." - Orwell, George

"He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window." - James, Henry

"Home is not where you live but where they understand you." - Christion, Morgenstern

"I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true." - Pirandello, Luigi

"The cure for writers cramp is writer's block." - Leon, Inigo de

"Your works will be read after Shakespeare and Milton are forgotten - and not till then." - Porson, Richard