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Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease. (Peter Abelard)
Learn as much by writing as by reading. (Lord Acton)
Advice to Persons About to Write History – Don't. (Lord Acton)
The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary. (Franklin P. Adams)
'Whom are you?' said he, for he had been to night school. (George Ade)
I like writing. It keeps my mind off grim subjects. It's therapeutic in the same way a patient in an institution is given fingerpaints. (Woody Allen)
The idea is to write it so that people hear it
and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart. (Maya Angelou)
Journalism is literature in a hurry. (Matthew Arnold)
It's the writing that teaches you. (Isaac Asimov)
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. (Isaac Asimov)
Writing is the worst part of being a writer. (James Atlas)
The right to write badly was the privilege we widely used. (Isaac Babel)
No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period put just at the right place. (Isaac Babel)
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. (Sir Francis Bacon)
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders. (Walter Bagehot)
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any. (Russell Baker)
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent. (James Baldwin)
If you can read it and it doesn't make sense, you are not stupid - it is. (Darby Bannard)
When you write something new about science, other scientists may not like it but they pay attention because it is subject to proof. When you write something new about art, it is subject only to the reader's discomfort, and will probably be rejected. (Darby Bannard)
Writing about art is only useful when it leads to the experience of art. (Darby Bannard)
For several days after my first book was published I carried it about in my pocket, and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded. (James M. Barrie)
-on receiving a note containing the single word: 'Fool!'...
I have known many an instance of a man writing a letter and forgetting to sign his name, but this is the only instance I have ever known of a man signing his name and forgetting to write the letter. (Henry Ward Beecher)
When I am dead, I hope it is said, "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." (Hilaire Belloc)
Of all the fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing. (Hilaire Belloc)
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. (Saul Bellow)
I don't keep my books around... they would embarrass me. When I finish writing my books, I kick them in the belly, and have done with them. (Ludwig Bemelmans)
It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things... (Aimee Bender)
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking. (Arnold Bennett)
Why do writers write? Because it isn't there. (Thomas Berger)
I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images. (Ingmar Bergman)
I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats. (John Berryman)
I only write books about dead people. They can't sue. (Pierre Berton)
reporter, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words. (Ambrose Bierce)
A good writer is not per se a good book critic, no more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender. (Jim Bishop)
Writing is done by someone. It is not, like some mythical goddess, a skill that springs forth, full grown from the genes of inspiration... (Leonard Bishop)
Any writer who believes in the 'lucky creative accident' in writing is pushing elephants on roller skates up greased ramps. (Leonard Bishop)
Morning writing centres me, clears the pond scum off the surface of my mind, plants my feet firmly on the ground and gets me out of my own way. (Eleanor Blair)
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream. (Jorge Luis Borges)
The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. (Jorge Luis Borges)
Writing an Artist's Statement can seem contrived to have to explain your own visual aesthetics. (Kelly Borsheim)
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea. (Elizabeth Bowen)
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written. (Elizabeth Bowen)
When you write – explode – fly apart – disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite. (Ray Bradbury)
Richard Bach with this book does two things. He gives me Flight. He makes me Young. For both I am deeply grateful. (Ray Bradbury)
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, / Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well. (Andre Breton)
-A Dry White Season epilogue, 1980
Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I knew nothing about it. (Andre Brink)
The idea that it is necessary to go to a university to become a successful writer... is one of those phantasies that surround authorship. (Vera Brittain)
I'm just going to write because I cannot help it. (Charlotte Bronte)
It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. (Anita Brookner)
It is the glory and merit of some men to write well and of others not to write at all. (Jean de La Bruyere)
Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, "I am not a crook." Jimmy Carter says, "I have lusted after women in my heart." President Reagan says, "I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope." (Art Buchwald)
In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write. (Pearl S. Buck)
Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well. (Duke of Buckingham)
Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
Writers are the main landmarks of the past. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas... a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed. (William S. Burroughs)
I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable. (Samuel Butler)
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them. (Samuel Butler)
There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing... (A. S. Byatt)
'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print. A book's a book, although there's nothing in't. (Lord Byron)
A small drop of ink makes thousands, perhaps millions... think. (Lord Byron)
I believe that what we want to write wants to be written. I believe that as I have an impulse to create, the something I want to create has an impulse to want to be born. My job, then, is to show up on the page and let that something move through me, in a sense, what wants to be written is none of my business. (Julia Cameron)
Those who write clearly have readers. (Albert Camus)
A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. (Albert Camus)
The great writers of aphorisms read as if they all had known each other very well. (Elias Canetti)
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. (Elias Canetti)
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. (Truman Capote)
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make. (Truman Capote)
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one. (Thomas Carlyle)
Writing is a splendid sorter of... feelings, better even than paint. (Emily Carr)
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled. (Raymond Chandler)
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say. (Raymond Chandler)
The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work. (Bruce Chatwin)
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. (G. K. Chesterton)
Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, / They damn those authors whom they never read. (Charles Churchill)
Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose. (Winston Churchill)
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. (Winston Churchill)
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book. (Cicero)
Writing is not complete when you've added everything you could, but rather, when you've taken away everything that is not needed. (Ann Clark)
The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
It is a melancholy fact that more nonsense can be talked about art than about any other subject, and writers of treatises on painting, from the great Leonardo downwards, have not been slow to avail themselves of this privilege. (John Collier)
Artists don't often know much about writing... but they don't bray so much about writing as writers do about art. (Matthew Collings)
If you want to be a writer – stop talking about it and sit down and write! (Jackie Collins)
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than write for the public and have no self. (Cyril Connolly)
An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness. (Cyril Connolly)
One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family. (Pat Conroy)
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to want to do. (Elvis Costello)
In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is. (Geoffrey Cotterell)
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings. (Quentin Crisp)
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. (Mario Cuomo)
Journalism consists in buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it at ten cents a pound. (Charles Anderson Dana)
-in later years...
Any reference to him in newspapers or magazines, however well meaning and favourable, threw Degas into a rage and he shut his door for good to the author. "What a fate!" he complained, "To be handed over to writers!" (Edgar Degas)
To be understood a writer has to explain almost everything. (Eugene Delacroix)
I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind. (Patrick Dennis)
There is nothing outside the text. (Jacques Derrida)
Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory. (Denis Diderot)
When I'm near the end of a book, I need to sleep in the same room with it. (Joan Didion)
Writers tend to consider distinction and originality as virtues, but they are anathema to publishers. (Thomas M. Disch)
An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children. (Benjamin Disraeli)
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. (E. L. Doctorow)
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money. (J. P. Donleavy)
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it. (Elizabeth Drew)
It is the first line that gives the inspiration and then it's like riding a bull. Either you just stick with it, or you don't. (Bob Dylan)
Just like painting, writing starts with a blank white canvas or page. It is what we bring to it that makes for beauty and pleasure. (Vicki Easingwood)
Don't try to save junk just because it took you a long time to write it. (David Eddings)
One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves. (George Eliot)
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense. (George Eliot)
Someone said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are what we know. (T. S. Eliot)
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghost-like. (Ralph Ellison)
'Tis the good reader that makes the good book. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
I've just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture: I was reading a book... I felt alive and engaged and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I've loved. (Nora Ephron)
You have to write badly in order to write well. (William Faulkner)
The moving finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, / Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. (Edward Fitzgerald)
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Writers aren't exactly people...they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in! (Gustave Flaubert)
Creative writers are always greater than the causes they represent. (E. M. Forster)
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. (Gene Fowler)
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common – a need to create an alternative world. (John Fowles)
What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque. (Brendan Francis)
-dated: April 5, 1944...
When I write, I can shake off all my cares. (Anne Frank)
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. (Robert Frost)
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. (Robert Frost)
You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country. (Robert Frost)
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces. (Paul Fussell)
One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read. (John Kenneth Galbraith)
I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past... (Eduardo Galeano)
The writer may not care about any reader other than himself, but his work has no public existence except insofar as the feeling is not mutual. (John Champlin Gardner)
Prologues precede the piece – in mournful verse; / As undertakers – walk before the hearse. (David Garrick)
The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power of man. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. (Jose Ortega Y Gasset)
Literature has nothing to do with usefulness; the most useful place in any house is the toilet. (Theophile Gautier)
This writing exercise is entirely different from the abstract joy and mysterious colour and design communication of painting. Writing is in a language that everyone can understand and is blatantly interpreted. (Sara Genn)
It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written. (Andre Gide)
We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained. (Nikki Giovanni)
Writers don't write from experience, though many are hesitant to admit that they don't. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. (Nikki Giovanni)
Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing. (Vincent van Gogh)
The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way, and that's heaven. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind. (Natalie Goldberg)
Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better. (Oliver Goldsmith)
It's art that's taught me to think and to write. (Andy Goldsworthy)
Television has raised writing to a new low. (Samuel Goldwyn)
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. (Nadine Gordimer)
You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better. (Maxim Gorky)
The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn't worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed. (Jeff Greenfield)
To write about writers is the novelist's confession that his arteries are hardening. (Francis Hackett)
Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read. (Pete Hamill)
I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose. (Jim Harrison)
If I had to give young writers advice, I'd say, don't listen to writers talking about writing. (Lillian Hellman)
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. (Ernest Hemingway)
May the words that flow between two lines, connect us to a world of peace. (Robert M. Hensel)
What am I writing for anyway? Is it like dreaming? Is it a benevolent process? Something that moves the past forward? And what about those people who say all you get from looking at the past is a stiff neck? (Selima Hill)
A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff. (Tony Hillerman)
There is no law that vulgarity and literary excellence cannot coexist. (A. Trevor Hodge)
You will have written exceptionally well if, by skilful arrangement of your words, you have made an ordinary one seem original. (Horace)
Nature not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write. (A. E. Housman)
If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away. (Victor Hugo)
A bad book is as much a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul. (Aldous Huxley)
Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art. (William Ralph Inge)
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything. (John Irving)
You are the one who writes and the one who is written. (Edmond Jabes)
I don't feel that I'm a good writer, but there are things I can't express in my paintings, such as the feeling of being out in a field and hearing a tractor radio from the neighboring field... so I write them at the bottom of my paintings. (Keith Jacobshagen)
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. (Henry James)
Writing, like making love, is more fun when you know what you're doing. (Eileen Jensen)
A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it. (Samuel Johnson)
The two most engaging powers of an author: new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new. (Samuel Johnson)
Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress? (Samuel Johnson)
Just when I thought my writing career was over... I had another thought! (Alar Jurma)
It's hard not to write satire. (Juvenal)
Writers speak stench. (Franz Kafka)
One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time, in others' minds. (Alfred Kazin)
Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, "Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide." (Larry King)
Constant reading will pull you into a place – a mind-set, if you like the phrase – where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. (Stephen King)
When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time." (Stephen King)
Write a non-fiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your every fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true. (Barbara Kingsolver)
Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled. (Dean Koontz)
You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice. (Barbara Kruger)
When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize. (Madeleine L'Engle)
-referring to his lack of payment for the Essays of Elia...
Damn the age. I'll write for antiquity. (Charles Lamb)
The problem that comes up over and over again is that these people want to be published. They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. (Anne Lamott)
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. (Ring Lardner, Jr.)
To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober. (Philip Larkin)
-letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 1913...
I like to write when I feel spiteful: it's like having a good sneeze. (D. H. Lawrence)
Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down and write it as it occurs to you. The writing is easy – it's the occurring that's hard. (Stephen Leacock)
If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that. (Ursula K. LeGuin)
Writer's block is little more than a period of rest, waiting. (Jim LeSire)
We have the power to bore people long after we are dead. (Sinclair Lewis)
The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business. (A. J. Liebling)
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better. (A. J. Liebling)
-to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852...
So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war! (Abraham Lincoln)
The art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye – is the great invention of the world. (Abraham Lincoln)
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around. (David John Lodge)
Look, then, into thine heart, and write! (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone,
but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars. (Martin Luther)
If all the earth were paper white / And all the sea were ink / 'Twere not enough for me to write / As my poor heart doth think. (John Lyly)
It is only in literature that coincidences seem unnatural. (Robert Lynd)
The exchange of words is a lot like a virtual handshake. Is the writer's grasp of the language strong and bold? Are the words gripping? Direct? Inventive? Sincere? (Alison Mackie)
I was a far better writer when I was writing, than after I'd learned about writing and wrote endlessly about other people's writing. (Mary Madsen)
Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day. (Norman Mailer)
There is no life that can be recaptured wholly, as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction. What does that tell you about the nature of life, and does one really want to know? (Bernard Malamud)
If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when reading. (Don Marquis)
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. (W. Somerset Maugham)
Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it. (W. Somerset Maugham)
In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others. (Andre Maurois)
A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people. (Peter McArthur)
Few of us write great novels; all of us live them. (Mignon McLaughlin)
-1925...
Writing is an outward expression of instinctive insight that must be summoned from the vastly deep of our mysterious selves. Therefore, it cannot be taught; indeed, it cannot even be summoned; it can only be permitted. (Hughes Mearns)
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it. (H. L. Mencken)
There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton. (H. L. Mencken)
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. (James Michener)
Like every writer, I am asked where my work originates, and if I knew I would go there more often to find more. (Arthur Miller)
And the books you write. They're not you. They're not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It's terrible. You can never rest. (Henry Miller)
The sinister thing about writing is that it starts off seeming so easy and ends up being so hard. (L. Rust Mills)
If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave. If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be. (Richard Mitchell)
Grammar, which can govern even kings. (Moliere)
When you write, don't just write - Purge! Purge so that it runs off the paper and drips onto the floor! (Bridgette Mongeon)
I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished. (Baron de Montesquieu)
Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. (Christopher Morley)
As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. (Toni Morrison)
By far the most common task for which the machines are used is writing – or word processing, as it's known to the same people who call journalism 'content.' (Robert Motherwell)
Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions... (Farley Mowat)
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. (Iris Murdoch)
I don't want to write without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me. (Gloria Naylor)
Writing is a completely private act. It's in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I'm creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift. (Antonya Nelson)
You ask me why I do not write something... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results. (Florence Nightingale)
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. (Anais Nin)
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. (Anais Nin)
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. (Flannery O'Connor)
Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts. (Flannery O'Connor)
Surely all of us could be writers if we only knew what time of day to write or what kind of pen to use. (Sara O'Leary)
I see myself as someone who's been saved by writing. God knows what I would have been, become or how I would have ended up without it. (Michael Ondaatje)
The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. (George Orwell)
In my writing I like to relate that hardships of struggle will diminish, as peace and happiness can be obtained when shared with others. (Patricia Palmer)
If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you. (Dorothy Parker)
Anything that is written to please the author is worthless. (Blaise Pascal)
Every page must explode, whether through seriousness, profundity, turbulence, nausea, the new, the eternal, annihilating nonsense, enthusiasm for principles, or the way it is printed. (Francis Picabia)
Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors. (Pablo Picasso)
When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. (Enrique Jardiel Poncela)
An essayist is a lucky person who has found a way to discourse without being interrupted. (Charles Poore)
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. (Alexander Pope)
Great Literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. (Ezra Pound)
I do not keep a diary. Never have. To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit. (Enoch Powell)
Many a writer seems to think he is never profound except when he can't understand his own meaning. (George Dennison Prentice)
The palest ink is better than the best memory. (Chinese proverb)
One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey. (Raymond Queneau)
Tell me that not everything I wrote was bad. (Maurice Ravel)
-advice given to a aspiring writer...
Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait. (Charles Reade)
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. (Paris Review)
I enjoy the process of writing. The torment comes in getting my bottom on the chair and in front of the typewriter. (Caryl Rivers)
The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it. (Alain Robbe-Grillet)
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. (Jim Rohn)
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself. (Jim Rohn)
A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. (Leo Rosten)
Writing is worthwhile because it gives us to ourselves, and then to each other. (Cathleen Rountree)
Do you think I know what I'm doing? / That for one breath or half a breath I belong to myself? / As much as a pen knows what it is writing / It may be the satisfaction I need depends on my going away / So that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home. (Rumi)
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live. (Francoise Sagan)
It is a pity that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books. (William Saroyan)
How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator. (Friedrich Von Schlegel)
It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest... It's like falling in love. Only more so. It feels like something criminal... (Carolyn See)
Do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once. (Walter Carruthers Sellar)
Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull. (Rod Serling)
Learn to write well, or not to write at all. (John Sheffield)
I am the Roman Emperor, and am above grammar. (Sigismund)
I write fast because I have not the brains to write slow. (Georges Simenon)
It's just a freak of fate that I'm paid to write, not paying to print my own books – but I'd be doing it anyway: it's my life. (Iain Sinclair)
The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual – when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions – it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance. (Isaac Bashevis Singer)
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers. (Logan Pearsall Smith)
A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. (Susan Sontag)
Sometimes when I am writing, I am aware of a rhythm, a dance, a fury, which is as yet empty of words. (Stephen Spender)
To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write. (Gertrude Stein)
-on Charlie Kaufman...
Kaufman writes movies like they're poems. (Joel Stein)
I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener. There you have it. We are not of the same trade at all and so how can your rules fit me? (John Steinbeck)
A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road. (Stendhal)
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent. (Stendhal)
I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation. (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
Vigorous writing is concise. (William Strunk Jr.)
I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world. (Mother Teresa)
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write. (William Makepeace Thackeray)
Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. (Paul Theroux)
When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural... (Henry David Thoreau)
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. (Richard Trench)
Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. (Anthony Trollope)
The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice. (Mark Twain)
There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written – it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. (Mark Twain)
A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one. (Kenneth Tynan)
Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing. (Brenda Ueland)
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. (John Updike)
Writers take words seriously - perhaps the last professional class that does - and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader. (John Updike)
Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds, toward heaven; that is by letters written with their quills. (Leonardo da Vinci)
In every author let us distinguish the man from his works. (Voltaire)
We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard. (Voltaire)
Writers can treat their mental illnesses every day. (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. (Peter de Vries)
Journal what you love, what you hate, what's in your head, what's important. Journaling organizes your thoughts; allows you to see things in a concrete way that otherwise you might not see. Focus on what you think you need to find in your art. (Kay WalkingStick)
If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise – attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it. (H. G. Wells)
I always say, keep a diary and some day it'll keep you. (Mae West)
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression. (Alfred North Whitehead)
The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. (Oscar Wilde)
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. (Oscar Wilde)
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. (Oscar Wilde)
Writing objects to the lie that life is small. Writing is a cell of energy. Writing defines itself. Writing draws its viewer in for longer than an instant. Writing exhibits boldness. Writing restores power to exalt, unnerve, shock, and transform us. Writing does not imitate life, it anticipates life. (Jeanette Winterson)
Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished. (William Wordsworth)
I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done. (Steven Wright)
Henry [Miller] kept his paintings separate from his writing. It's as though stories came from the other side of his brain. (Noel Young)
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