My Favourite Twenty Quotes About Writing

“The world has no pity on a man who can’t do or produce something it thinks worth money. You may be a divine poet, and if some good fellow doesn’t take pity on you you will starve by the roadside. Society is as blind and brutal as fate.” – George Gissing, ‘New Grub Street’

“In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.” – Don DeLillo

“Artists are nourished by each other more than by fame or by the public… to give one’s work to the world is an experience of peculiar emptiness. The work goes away from the artist into a void… Criticism is crushing and humiliating. As for praise, somehow it falls short, empty superlatives. The true artist knows the pitfalls of vanity… to like and admire is not enough: did you understand? Praise has to do with the past, the finished thing, the unfinished is the artist’s preoccupation.” 

– Joyce Johnson

“A novel is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. No other art can do that. No other art can capture the essential inwardness of human life.” – Paul Auster

“Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really want to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.” – L. Ron Hubbard

“Writing for me is access to spirituality; [it] gives my life meaning, a meaning that I determine, not one that’s determined for me. Every time I write, I’m in church.” – Chuck Palahniuk

“What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? The human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology?” – William Gaddis, ‘The Recognitions’

 “A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.” – Peggy Noonan

“Talent is never enough. The history of literature is strewn with the corpses of writers who, through no fault of their own, missed out on the timing, or were just a little too far ahead of their generation. The world never hears of its greatest men; the men it calls great are just ahead enough of the average to stand out, but not far enough ahead to be remote. Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and, if you do like it, don’t take anyone’s advice about changing it. They just don’t know.” – Raymond Chandler

“The holiness of creating is my joy. Being in the moment – time and space are negated and we know our true self – eternal, joyous and free. There is only love… I live for this. This is life.” – Bill Hicks

“I thought the life of a writer would really be the thing. It’s simply hell. I’m just a cheap, twittering slave.” – Charles Bukowski

“You change as you write books. You cannot assume the same persona again. You cannot continue as before. Each book an author writes represents a period in his development. One’s novels can be seen as the milestones in the development of one’s spirit. So you cannot go back.” – Orhan Pamuk

“It would be more profitable for the farmer to raise rats for the granary than for the bourgeois to nourish the artist, who must always be occupied with undermining institutions.” – Anton Chekhov

 “It’s rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about.” – John Ashbery

“Fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame’s message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable.” 

– Roberto Bolano, ‘2666’

“The malaise of writing – and it is of no consequence whether the writer is talented or otherwise – is that after a time a man writing arrives at a point outside human relationships, becomes, as it were, ahuman.” – Frederick Exley

“That’s what is wrong about the artist’s association with the huckster – today has been canonized, beatified. But today is just one day in the history of our planet. It’s the be-all and end-all only for somebody who is selling something.” – Orson Welles

“Art was perhaps this – the psychological component of the autoimmune system. It works on the artist as a healing. But it works on others, too, as a medicine. Hence our great, insatiable thirst for it… it consoles and heals something in us.” – Ted Hughes

“I am someone who tries to write, who right now more and more seems to need to write, daily; and who hopes less that the products of that need are curative or even liked that simply received, read, seen.” – David Foster Wallace

“You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame…. You have to obtain reputation before you can get a fair hearing for that which would justify your repute.” – George Gissing, ‘New Grub Street’