Memorable and Humorous Quotations for Writers

Writing, Labor, the First Amendment, Freedom of the Press, Politics

"Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you."
—Cyril Connolly (1903 - 1974)

"From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
—Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
—Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

"When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."
—Raymond Chandler

"When I retire I'm going to spend my evenings by the fireplace going through those boxes. There are things in there that ought to be burned."
—Richard Milhouse Nixon (1913-94)

"If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come."
—Raymond Chandler

"A functioning police state needs no police."
—William S. Burroughs

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
—Ray Bradbury

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
—Samuel Johnson

"No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue..."
—Samuel Johnson, 1751

"Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
—G. M. Trevelyan (1876 - 1962)

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."
—Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

"The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts."
—Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test."
—George W. Bush

"No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves."
—John Peter Zenger

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
—Plato

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sunday."
—Kurt Vonnegut

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug."
—Mark Twain

"I'm astounded by people who take eighteen years to write something. That's how long it took that guy to write Madame Bovary, and was that ever on the best-seller list?"
—Sylvester Stallone, who wrote the script to Rocky in three days

"A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book."
—Ernest Hemingway

"What we want is a story that starts with an earthquake and builds to a climax."
—Samuel Goldwyn

"Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead."
—Gene Fowler

"Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."
—William Faulkner

"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon."
—Robert Cromier

"The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them."
—Raymond Chandler

"I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."
—Woody Allen (1935 - )

"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing...I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain."
—Lord Byron

"There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)

"Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style."
—Kurt Vonnegut

"The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements. I had no idea until then that you could not rely on [them]."
—William J. Fulbright, U.S. Senator, 1985

"The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people."
—Cesar Chavez, Civil Rights

"Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased."
—Adam Smith

"The legislature's job is to write law. It's the executive branch's job to interpret law."
—George W. Bush

"Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?"
—George W. Bush

"If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order."
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957

"I love deadlines. I especially love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
—Douglas Adams

"More and more of our imports are coming from overseas."
—George W. Bush

"Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs."
—John Osborne

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."
—Mark Twain

"All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value."
—Carl Sagan

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
—Dorothy Parker

"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself—it is the occurring which is difficult."
—Stephen Leacock

"Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing and it becomes chronic in their sick minds."
—Juvenal (AD 60-130)

"Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to."
—Hannen Swaffer, 1928

"A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever."
—Martin Tupper, 1838

"Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like."
—Edward, First Baron Thurlow, 1844

"It took me 15 years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous."
—Robert Benchley

"Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment."
—Learned Hand, 1948

"As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out."
—Mark Twain, 1894

"If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when reading."
—Don Marquis, 1878-1937

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
—Samuel Johnson, 5 April 1776

"Let Shakespeare do it his way, I'll do it mine. We'll see who comes out better."
—Mae West, 1892-1980

"Authors are judged by strange capricious rules
The great ones are thought mad, the small ones fools."
—Alexander Pope, 1717

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."
—Peter de Vries, 1977

"It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell."
—The Chicago Times, 1861

"Great is truth, but still greater is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, propagandists have influenced public opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations."
—Aldous Huxley, British author

"The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny."
—Michael Parenti, author and media critic

"Propaganda seeks to create in the public a chronic sense of crisis, which in turn justifies the expansion of executive power and the secrecy surrounding it."
—Christopher Lasch, U.S. writer, 1979

"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both."
—James Madison, 1822

"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."
—Thomas Jefferson, 1786

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be."
—Thomas Jefferson, 1816

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."
—Learned Hand, U.S. jurist, 1944

"Freedom of the mind does not exist long unless it has outspoken sponsors who make free inquiry and free expression their cause."
—William Douglas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1962

"Freedom of choice presupposes a full appreciation of all the alternatives involved, and one feature common to all propaganda is that it tries to limit our choice deliberately."
—J.A.C. Brown, British propaganda analyst, 1963

"Those who won our independence believed that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people, that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American Government."
—Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1927

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. There is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air however slight..."
—William Douglas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

"Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty."
—Benjamin Franklin

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."
—James Madison, 1822