“But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.” — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.” — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love -- and most of all, an audience! — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“There are only two living American authors fully deserving of the Nobel Prize. One is Lewis Mumford. The other is Wallace Stegner,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“What I am really writing about, what I have always written about, is the idea of human freedom, human community, the real… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
A good writer must have more than vin rose in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.” — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.” — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“When I want to write something I just sit down (or stand up) and do it. Scribble, scribble, nothing could be easier.… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Writing on the wall: Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true. ... It… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human beings. By submitting to huge hierarchies of power,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying -- a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“Me, I'm living under a sword too, as Jack may have told you. An old wino's disease, which could lay me in the grave… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
![“[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.” quote by Edward Abbey](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/eb8/edward-abbey-254_real-people_r-eality-and-real-people-are-too-subtle_632160.jpg)
![“[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true. ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.” quote by Edward Abbey](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/3ae/edward-abbey-254_character_i-t-is-the-writer-s-duty-to-write-fictio_2428868.jpg)
