Timeless Writing Quotes

It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."

In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.

My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That's hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.

Barrie and the wonderful characters he created, Lewis Carroll, even French literature, like Baudelaire or over in the States, Poe, you open those books, you open The Flowers of Evil and begin to read. If it were written today, you'd be absolutely stupefied by the work. It's this incredible period where the work is timeless, ageless. So yeah, I just love all those guys. It's my deep passion in those great 19th century writers.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Only a few things are worth a second reading—rarely are things of such enduring quality that they are read many times and live to inspire a second or third generation.

The great thing about James Baldwin and his writing is that it's still fresh every time you pick it up. That's also the sad thing about his writing sometimes, too.

I just started to put texting and phones in my books. I want my books to be read 20 years from now; I don't want them to be dated.

The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.

I hope people find my movies funny and will watch them years from now. And, in terms of writing, I hope that something remains that will not seem old-fashioned, that will still have a ­vibrancy to it 50 years from now.

Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.

I own a copy of the original 'Talking Heads' by Alan Bennett, which I purchased many years ago shortly after they were first broadcast. It's been lovingly well-thumbed over the years. They are magnificent. A masterpiece.

Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself.

Like a lot of us, sometimes I'm preaching to the choir, and sometimes my voice doesn't even get heard at all. Sometimes I think that what I'm writing now might not even have an impact for the next three or four generations. Sometimes I sit there and write, and I think, "It'll be two hundred years before they get what I'm writing about."

My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.

I believe if a sentence is to retain its strength over time, it needs to be carefully made.

When you're writing a book, you don't want it to be overly trendy because you want people to enjoy it for years and refer back to it.

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.

The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.

Written pages are something that can be returned to, reclaimed, and when they are marvelous, never lose their power.

Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time