Quote Unquote

by Susan Rogers Cooper

I was recently in the market for a good quote for a talk I was asked to give. So I started doing my research and found more than I bargained for. Unfortunately I can't bombard my listeners with all the great quotes I found, so, instead, I intend to bombard the reader. Go forth at your own risk.

On the act of writing:

“Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”

Colette

“I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because when two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.”

Agatha Christie

“Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.”

Lillian Hellman

“All books are either dreams or swords. You can cut or you can drug with words.”

Amy Lowell

“Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But far better to write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.”

Katherine Mansfield

“The difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, 'He's still alive.' But in a painting or a photo you can't show “still.” You can just show him being alive.”

Susan Sontag

“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”

Oscar Wilde

“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

Mary Heaton Vorse

*Note: I have also seen this quote attributed to Ernest Hemmingway.

“Writing a book is like scrubbing an elephant: there's no good place to begin or end, and it's hard to keep track of what you've already covered.”

Anon.

“The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.”

Margaret Atwood

On the consequences of writing:

“It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.”

Margaret Anderson

“I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.”

Lydia M. Child

“A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay

On the opinions of others:

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

Dorothy Parker

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

Sylvia Plath

“The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.”

Anon.

On criticism:

“There is probably no hell for authors in the next world – they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.”

C.N. Bovee

“What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.”

Logan Pearsall Smith

“Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.”

Logan Pearsall Smith

“Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true,

But are not critics to their judgment too?”

Alexander Pope

“Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense.”

Samuel Johnson

“People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.”

W. Somerset Maugham

What are some of your favorite quotes about writing, authors, books, criticism, etc.?  Maybe that's something we all, we writers, can reach for -- to be quoted some day.  Would that be cool, or what?