Writers and Writing

1 As we know, there is often a great difference between the man & the writer. The writer may be bitter, harsh & brutal while the man may be so meek & mild that he wouldn’t say boo to a goose

W. Somerset Maugham

2 Literature, literary creation, is not distinct or separable, for me, from the rest of the man… I may taste a work, but it is difficult for me judge it independently of my knowledge of the man himself; & I will say willingly, tel arbre, tel fruit
Saint- Beuve

3 The writer’s true self is manifested in his books alone.
Marcel Proust

4. I think, like most writers, that I am most completely myself when I write, & not the rest of the time. I have a social self, & my full self can’t be released except in the writing.
Salman Rushdie

5 The artist was what he did-he was nothing else.
Henry James

6 Like God in the universe, the writer should be omnipresent in his work but never visible.
Gustav Flaubert

7 Who does not wish that the writer of “The Illiad” had gratified succeeding ages with a little knowledge of himself
Samuel Johnson

8 The poet may mean more than he knew-easily may not want to tell. No reason for not asking.
William Empson

9 If you are puzzled by what someone is doing, asking him what he is trying to do is such an obvious step that no smart argument could possibly talk us into thinking it foolish.
Morse Peckham

10.The author should die once he has finished writing, so as not to trouble the path of the text.
Reflections on “The Name of the Rose: Umberto Eco

11. The design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.
The International Fallacy: W. Wimsatt & M. C. Beardsley

12 You can’t draw the line & say I’m a writer & I’m only going to speak out on issues that affect writers. I’m also a human being, & if people are detained without trial & are neither released nor charged, then one must oppose these things entirely.
Nadine Gordimar

13.In Spain the writer is always a presumed heretic
Camilo Jose Cela

14.Fiction isn’t truth. It’s a type of writing from which some form of truth emerges.
Muriel Spark

15. I felt I had this responsibility to my community to represent us in all our diversity
Sandra Cisneros

16 Madame Bovary is me
Gustave Flaubert

17 I’m so dazzled by the richness of the world that I think fiction is not quite catching it
V. S. Naipaul

18. I was not interested in what I thought; I was interested in what the people thought”

19.For me, art must transform. I don’t want to be served up life as it is. I know that I want to be served up that alchemical transformation that turns gunmetal into gold.
Athol Fugard

20 I am just the chronicler. My passion is to discover, & to write about it.
Tom Wolfe

21 When I am writing, it’s like being possessed. I write the books that I do because I can’t avoid writing them.
Salman Rushdie

22. I’m a journalist at heart; even as a novelist, I’m first of all a journalist. I think all novels should be journalism to start, & if you can ascend from that plateau to some marvelous altitude, terrific. I really don’t think it’s possible to understand the individual without understanding the society

23 The highest complement you could give me is to say you found something I wrote funny. I would love to be thought of as a writer of funny things
Robert Drewe

24 I don’t think there’s any final defined role that a writer has in any society. One of the basic functions of the writer is to confront society with things it might not like to see out in the open.
Not that I think of the writer as a public crusader, because that would debase literature to the level of propaganda.
If I write about Apartheid it’s only because it affects my own private, most personal life every day of my existence
Andre Brink

25 I hate writing. I mean, I hate actually doing it, & trying to think about the readers as would be an agony. There’s something about writing that is completely draining.
Penelope Fitzgerald

26 A writer should let his books be read, & not let his shadow steal their light.
Viktor Pelevin

27 The idea that the writers should not argue about the world & simply write their little stories is a defeat
Salman Rushdie

28 A few years ago, a British journalist asked Mr. Lodge just how much firsthand experience went into the stories of extramarital adventure in his fiction. The novelist replied that he had always been faithful to his wife. In an essay, he once wrote that he head covered the struggle for sexual liberation “as a war correspondent, never a combatant.
David Lloyd

29 Critics have written that death was theme in your latest short-story collection, “Lost,” presumably because they knew that you are now in your 80s. Is it a theme?
Nobody will ever allow that the writer has imagination & can project through different ages. One of the first stories I ever published was about an old man who goes on a visit to his son & daughter in law. It’s all about his feeling not wanted, feeling lost & out of it. But how did I know? I was 15 years old.
Nadine Gordimar

30 My novels are concerned with either social or historical issues. For me, fiction is all about the people. Whether good or bad, the characters have to be vividly portrayed.
Writer Li Guo (Lee Kim Chai)

31 I think a writer has to be responsible towards history & society.
Writer Li Guo (Lee Kim Chai)

32 The Novel was there not to convey abstract ideas or philosophies,
nor to form symbolic shapes or offer lazy consolations.
It was about character & freedom, & dealt with the reality of human figures in their emotional & moral lives.
If it resembled philosophy, it was quiet distinct from it.
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)

33 After all, nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation.
Orhan Pamuk (Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006) in his book “The Black Book” (1994)

34 Essential function of literature
In an interview following the Nobel Prize, Orhan Pamuk stated that the essential function of literature is to recognize that the other person, whom culture, politics & propaganda represent as enemy, is no enemy. As he put it, “He is like us; she is like us. We are other.
Orhan Pamuk

35 I have much respect for Faulkner. What Faulkner did was to combine complicated history with modernist literature, experimental literature, with an art that is authentic & new & daring. I have also tried to do it.
Orhan Pamuk who considers that the greatest virtue of the citizens of Istanbul is their ability to see the city through both Western & Eastern eyes.

36 Coleridge said, in his “Biograhia Literaria,” that there are two kinds of imagination, the Primary & Secondary. We all, he said, possess the Primary Imagination, we all, have the capacity to perceive, to notice. But what only poets- loosely translated as all truly creative people, I suppose- have, the Secondary Imagination, is the capacity to select, & then translate & illuminate, everything that has been observed so that it seems to the audience something entirely new, something entirely true, something excitingly wonderful or terrible.
Joanna Trollope 2001

37 Writing is a long process of introspection: It is a voyage toward the darkest caverns of the consciousness, a long, slow meditation
Isabel Allende

38 The challenge of a historical novel is not to render a perfect imitation of the past, but to relates history with something new, enrich & change it with imagination & sensuousness of personal experience
Orhan Pamuk
(In the Swedish Academy prize citation, he is commended as an artist who "has discovered new symbols for the clash & interlacing of cultures.”)

39 Nabokov (author of Lolita) , a verbal magicician surpassed only by James Joyce, did all this with his kaleidoscopic words, not one of them dirty.

40 In essence, it requires journalists to explain the pattern behind events & not merely report events; reveal the structures that are operative & in people’s daily lives & not merely report the incidents in those lives.
James Fallows

41 Other men are mere scribblers in comparison. That a foreigner should write like this is one of the miracles of Literature.
George Gissing on Joseph Conrad

42 The writer’s life requires the jolts of fresh experience, & you can’t get these from an occasional holiday on the Costa Brava. You have to get out altogether. I am speaking as a professional writer, not as a remittance man or as a Gauguin revolting against bourgeoisie. A lot of professional British writers manage to strike fire out of a British environment. The job of the serious writer is not to confirm readers & critics in their prejudices about what is or is not important. I saw the narrow insularity of British life when I get back from Borneo. People I met in pubs, when told where Borneo was, used to ask what kind of television programmes we had there. It struck me that you couldn’t make literature out of suburban adultery, the mythology of television entertainers, or the assumption that certain sports & political figures are of shattering world importance. If I wanted to go on writing, I had to get out.
Anthony Burgess

43 I just write what I see happening. I’m a weatherman, trying to forecast what’s ahead.
I’m waiting for the next shift in the weather. I spend a lot of time looking at the sky.
J. G. Ballard

44 The artificiality of fiction is usually condemned when it presents a property not much found in real life-that of coincidence. Dickens is regarded as a prime offender, but it may be that without coincidence the novel cannot properly exist. Characters appear, disappear, then appear again, but in a manner so obviously contrived that we know that we are outside the stringencies of real life.
Anthony Burgess

45 There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.
Somerset Maugham

46 If I write about a place, I have been there. If I write about a meal in Indonesia I have eaten there in that restaurant. I don't think you can fool the reader.
Sydney Sheldon