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Writing has ... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.
HENRIK IBSEN, Speeches and New Letters
The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
EUGENE IONESCO, Present Past / Past Present
At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.
MARK TWAIN, "How to Tell a Story"
If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader.
STAN LEE, interview, Mar. 13, 2006
Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process -- it is, after all, black magic, and may lose its power if we look that particular gift horse too closely in the mouth.
EDWARD ALBEE, introduction, Three Tall Women
Brevity is the sister of talent.
ANTON CHEKHOV, letter to A.P. Chekhov, April 11, 1889
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, Nobel Lecture, 2000
Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul.
One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1954
There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE, Barchester Towers
As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.
When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
GAO XINGJIAN, Dialogue and Rebuttal
Everybody wants to feel that you're writing to a certain demographic because that's good business, but I've never done that ... I tried to write stories that would interest me. I'd say, what would I like to read?... I don't think you can do your best work if you're writing for somebody else, because you never know what that somebody else really thinks or wants.
STAN LEE, Brandweek, May 2000
Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.
EDWARD ALBEE, Saturday Review, May 4, 1966
Write only of what is important and eternal.
ANTON CHEKHOV, The Seagull
It's not a bad thing for a man to have to live his life--and we nearly all manage to dodge it. Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of us--a book or a picture or a symphony; and we're amazed at our feat, and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms reproduce each other without renewed fertilization. So there we are, committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as like as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the lines a little fainter; whereas they ought to be--if we touch earth between times--as different from each other as those other creatures--jellyfish, aren't they, of a kind?--where successive generations produce new forms, and it takes a zoologist to see the hidden likeness.
EDITH WHARTON, "The Legend," Taled of Men and Ghosts
If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug.
HENRIK IBSEN, letter to Björnstjerne Björnson, Sept. 12, 1865
One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.
ARTHUR MILLER, "The Shadows of the Gods"
I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.
HAROLD PINTER, interview, Dec. 1971
The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.
MARK TWAIN, "How to Tell a Story"
Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
JOHN DRYDEN, Essay on Satire
There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.
GEORGE ORWELL, Down and Out in Paris and London
In writing ... remember that the biggest stories are not written about wars, or about politics, or even murders. The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together.
SUSAN GLASPELL, Little Masks
To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, The Common Reader
When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.
STEPHEN KING, Entertainment Weekly, Aug. 17, 2007
Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light -- and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau -- into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
NADINE GORDIMER, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1991
The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO, Six Characters in Search of an Author
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