Famous Writer’s Quotes
“What is to give light must endure burning.” Viktor Frankl
“The artist lives in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.” Harry Crews
“Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.” John Osborne
“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
- Robert Benchley
“PROOF-READER, n. A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.”
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
“There is probably no hell for authors in the next world — they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.”
- C. N. Bovee
“Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.”
- Ray Bradbury
“A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.”
- Joseph Conrad
“At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance–that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be–curiosity–to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don’t think the talent makes much difference, whether you’ve got it or not.”
- William Faulkner
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”
- William Faulkner
“An artist’s sensitivity to criticism is, at least in part, an effort to keep unimpaired the zest, or confidence, or arrogance, which he needs to make creation possible; or an instinct to climb through his problems in his own way as he should, and must.”
- Christopher Fry
