by Greg Winkler

Created on: January 10, 2009   Last Updated: January 11, 2009

Quotes on Writing

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

-Richard Bach: Author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull

"Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy."

-H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

"Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want."

-Anatole Broyard

"In Ireland, a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist."

-Unknown

"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."

-Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

"I sound my barbaric yawp from the rooftops of the world."

-Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

"To call Richard Brautigans poetry doggerel is an insult to the entire canine world."

-Lazlo Coakley

"A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself."

-Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977)

"Jake liked his women the way he liked his kiwi fruit; sweet, yet tart, firm-fleshed yet yielding to the touch, and covered with short brown hair."

-Gretchen Schmidt

Entry in San Jose State's bad writing contest: 1989

"As she fell face down into the black muck of the mud-wrestling pit, her sweaty 300-pound opponent muttering soft curses in Latin on top of her, Sister Marie thought "There is no doubt about it; the Pope has betrayed me." "

-Richard Savastio

Entry in San Jose State's bad writing contest: 1983

"Being a newspaper columnist is a lot like being married to a nymphomaniac. It's great for the first two weeks."

-Lewis Grizzard

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing an oxen turned into bouillon cubes."

-John LeCarre'

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."

-H.G. Wells (1866-1946)

"Writing is a profession in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none."

-Jules Renard (1864-1910)

"The New York Times Book Review is alive with the sound of axes grinding."

-Gore Vidal

"The relationship of editor to author is knife to throat."

-Unknown

"Reading this book is like waiting for the first shoe to drop."

-Ralph Novak

"Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."

-Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biography."

-Barbara Harrison

"No man but a blockhead every wrote except for money."

-Samuel Johnson

"I have been an author for 22 years and an ass for 55."

-Mark Twain

"Only Presidents, editors, and people with tapeworm have the right to use the editorial we.'"

-Mark Twain

"You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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