“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
All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love -- and most of all, an audience! — 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
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
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
“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
How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist. — 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective. — 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
“But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.” — 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
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
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 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
