Edward Abbey - Writer Quotes

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King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.

Edward Abbey
A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.

Edward Abbey
But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.

Edward Abbey
Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.

Edward Abbey
Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

Edward Abbey
The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

Edward Abbey
It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.

Edward Abbey
When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.

Edward Abbey
Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati — those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.

Edward Abbey
The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.

Edward Abbey
Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.

Edward Abbey
It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?

Edward Abbey
When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.

Edward Abbey
The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.

Edward Abbey
Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

Edward Abbey
I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.

Edward Abbey
All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love — and most of all, an audience!

Edward Abbey