Aldous Huxley Writing Quotations

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Isn't it remarkable how everyone who knew [D.H.] Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he's had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!

I've never discussed my writing with others much, but I don't believe it can do any harm. I don't think that there's any risk that ideas or materials will evaporate.

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.

Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular

I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts.

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.

If you want to write, keep cats.

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.