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"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."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