You hear all this whining going on, Where are our great writers? The thing I might feel doleful about is, Where are the readers? Gore Vidal, What I’ve Learned 2008
I come from a backward place: your duty is supplied by life around you. One guy plants bananas; another plants cocoa; I’m a writer, I plant lines. There’s the same clarity of occupation, and the sense of devotion. Derek Walcott, Guardian 12th July 1997
The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it. Samuel Johnson, A Free Enquiry, 1757
A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it. Samuel Johnson
Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. Samuel Johnson, cited James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, quoting college tutor
The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book. ibid.
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. ibid.
I like to write when I feel spiteful; it’s like having a good sneeze. D H Lawrence, letter 25th November 1913
Developed five-thousand years ago in the Middle East writing is an extension of the human brain. Mankind: The Story of All of Us I, History Channel 2012
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. Virginia Woolf
The carping malice of the vulgar world, who think it a proof of sense to dislike every thing that is writ by women. Susannah Centlivre, 1669-1723, The Platonic Lady
Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars – to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording – all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night. Sylvia Plath
And by the way, everything in life is writeable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish. John Jakes
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon, Essays: ‘Of Studies’, 1625
For those who have tasted the profound activity of writing, reading is no more than a secondary pleasure. Stendhal aka Henri Beyle, De l’Amour
I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in the writing. Francis Quaries, Emblems, 1635
If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. Stephen King
By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer’s greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry. Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians
Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read. Jorge Luis Borges
Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste. Voltaire, Candide
One man is as good as another until he has written a book. Benjamin Jowett
A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called ‘leaves’) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time – proof that humans can work magic. Carl Sagan
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book. Cicero
One day I’ll surprise you and write something good. In a Lonely Place 1950 starring Humphrey Bogart & Gloria Grahame & Frank Lovejoy & Art Smith & Carl Benton Reid & Martha Stewart & Jeff Donnell & Robert Warwick & Morris Ankrum & William Ching et al, director Nicholas Ray, Dixon at bar
I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid the best: he said ransom notes. Get Shorty 1995 starring Gene Hackman & John Travolta & Rene Russo & Danny DeVito & Dennis Farina & Bett Midler & Delroy Lindo & James Gandolfini & Jon Gries & Renne Props & David Paymer et al, director Barry Sonnenfeld, Harry to Chili
Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. The Lost Weekend 1945 starring Ray Milland & Jane Wyman & Phillip Terry & Howard Da Silva & Doris Dowling & Frank Faylen & Mary Young & Anita Sharp-Bolster & Lilian Fontaine et al, director Billy Wilder, Don to Nat
Write again, write again. I’m not dead yet. I’ve got weeks and weeks to live ... What a pity it is that we can’t change places for a fortnight. Here am I, aching for a quiet house to hide in and get poems off my chest. Siegfried Sassoon, letter to Robert Nichols
I have been gripped by the seventeenth century. It was Britain’s most revolutionary century when all the forces of modernity began to stir under the old order slugging it out on the great battlegrounds of religion and politics. Adam Nicholson, The Century That Wrote Itself I: The Written Self, BBC 2013
Two civil wars, one king almost blown up, another with his head cut off, a third simply got rid of. ibid.
This first truly modern century. Writing: writing was everywhere. ibid.
This was the beginning of the age we now live in, the moment we left the Middle Ages behind and set out on the track to modernity. ibid.
Words became public weapons promoting revolutionary ideas. ibid.
A literacy revolution. ibid.
In the seventeenth century status was still everything to the gentry. ibid.
The giant shift from the pre-modern to the scientific frame of mind. Adam Nicholson, The Century That Wrote Itself II: The Rewritten Universe
Lives lived in consistent danger. ibid.
Death was more present in seventeenth-century England than anywhere on Earth today. ibid.
Reading and writing allowed people to question what they’d been told, to engage in fierce debate, and to re-write the rules of politics and self-expression. Adam Nicholson, The Century that Wrote Itself III: A World Re-Shaped by Writing
This is the birth of privacy. The private letter was a new kind of vehicle for private emotion. ibid.
Slavery: This business built on human blood and human suffering became one of the most important of the seventeenth century. ibid.
This was an empire founded on ink and paper. ibid.
The power of the word would now take over from the power of the sword. Lucy Worsley, Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency 3/3, BBC 2011