Jack London Quotes

The number of people who can copulate properly may be few; the number who can write well are infinitely fewer.

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

It is the glory and merit of some men to write well and of others not to write at all.

When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.

My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing.

I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.

I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.

I'm here because of what I write. Obviously, I must know something.

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

I've found that writers who don't read really can't write.

We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.

I adore Toni Morrison. I think we would all be better writers if we read more of her.

I was asked in an interview once: You're writing another book with a female lead? Aren't you afraid you're going to be pigeonholed? And I thought, I write a team superhero book, an uplifting solo hero book, I write a horror-western, and I write a ghost story. What am I gonna be pigeonholed as? Has a man in the history of men ever been asked if he was going to be pigeonholed because he wrote two consecutive books with male leads?

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

Women excel more in literary judgment than in literary production,--they are better critics than authors.

Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.

Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.

It is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Every body allows that the talent of writing is particularly female. Nature might have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.

Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man.