Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
- Paul Theroux
I write to escape … to escape poverty.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs
An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.
- Thornton Wilder
Only a mediocre writer is always at his best.
- W. Somerset Maugham
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
- T. S. Eliot
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
- Walter Bagehot
Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly every day.
- William Allingham
Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.
- Wilson Mizner
If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
- Kingsley Amis
His books are going like wildfire everybody is burning them.
- George De Witt
People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
- Oliver Herford
Many thanks for your book. I shall lose not time in reading it.
- Benjamin Disraeli
It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
- Andrew Jackson
The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.
- Herman Wouk
Dr Donne’s verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding.
- James I
If writers were good businessmen, they’d have too much sense to be writers.
- Irvin S. Cobb
A dramatist is a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom.
- Kenneth Tynan
Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.
- Wolcott Gibbs
Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.
- Stephen Hawking
It’s a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.
- Erle Stanley Gardner
The reminiscences of Mrs. Humphrey Ward … convinced me that autobiography is a sin.
- Harold Laski
They told me that Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.
- Winston Churchill
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
- Dorothy Parker
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid and stable business.
- John Steinbeck
When he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech.
- John Aubrey
You call this a script? Give me a couple of $5000.00-a-week writers and I’ll write it myself.
- Joe Pasternak
A good novel tells us the truth about it’s hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
I just wrote a book, but don’t go out and buy it yet, because I don’t think it’s finished yet.
- Lawrence Welk
The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.
- Richard Harding Davis
If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn’t concern the central issues, it wouldn’t be worth publishing.
- Alan Paton
This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
- Dorothy Parker
I thought I’d begin reading a poem by Shakespeare but then I thought why should I? He never reads any of mine.
- Spike Milligan
The censorious said that she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats’ poems but her family denied both stories.
- H.H.Munro
Waldo is one of those people who would be greatly improved by death.
- H.H.Munro
He was an author whose works were so little known they were almost confidential.
- Stanley Walker
This book of Italian literature shows a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.
- Oscar Wilde
Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.
- Samuel Johnson
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