2,612 Quotes About Writers

I believe that half the trouble in the world comes from people asking 'What have I achieved?' rather than 'What have I enjoyed?' I've been writing about a subject I love as long as I can remember--horses and the people associated with them, anyplace, anywhere, anytime. I couldn't be happier knowing that young people are reading my books. But even more important to me is that I've enjoyed so much the writing of them.

Good writing shouldn’t be wrapped in cellophane. It should be open to the elements and full of maggots, and it should be left to grow and deepen and fester. I hang on to that.

All writers are different, each have their own artist way they go about telling a story. The only thing they have in common, is they write.

Det var nästan som att upptäcka en författare man inte läst, fast man stöter i och för sig hela tiden på författare som man inte har läst medan det är mycket sällsynt, åtminstone i vuxen ålder, att man plötsligt hittar en stor popartist som har gett ut massor av bra skivor. Oftast är det fördomar snarare än okunnighet som gör att man missar stora artister, och fördomar är svåra att göra sig av med (det är ju så roligt att få dem bekräftade).

You may receive a pie, eat it and forget. You may receive champagne, drink it and forget. But when you receive a book, you can open it again and again.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.

True criticism praises true art for what it does-praises as plainly and comprehensively as possible-and denounces false art for its failure to do art's proper work. No easy task, the task of the critic, since the trolls are masters of disguise.

True art imitates nature's total process: endless blind experiment (fish that climb tress, hands with nine fingers, shifts in and out of tonality) and then ruthless selectivity-the artist's sober judgements, like a lion's, of what can be killed, what is better left alone, such as (for the lion) rhinos and certain nasty snakes. Art, in sworn opposition to chaos, discovers by its process what it can say. That is art's morality.

True art is too complex to reflect the party line.