Writers - Writing Quotes

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

I consider time as an immense ocean, in which many noble authors are entirely swallowed up.

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.

Give the historians something to write about.

As long as I don’t write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice and just as the touch on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice […]

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

I was sitting around a table with friends, smoking a joint, when we heard “Rubber Soul” for the very first time; and I’m smoking and I’m getting high and the album blew my mind because it was a whole album with all good stuff! It flipped me out so much, I said, “I’m gonna try […]

The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noble pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble conscience.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture – it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.