Writing Quotes

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

I think people want their illusions and writers are mostly illusion. When you read their words, you read a flattened, incomplete version of the writer.

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you’re doing, or it comes out flat. You can’t fake your way through this.

Good writing takes more than just time; it wants your best moments and the best of you.

I write because I'm afraid to say some things out loud.

It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It’s the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

There are a lot of people who can't write and maybe shouldn't write.

I always wrote with the idea that what I put out there is going to stay there. Once I publish something, it has been published. I've never deleted more than one or two posts from my site. I don't think that there are takebacks. I don't feel right about it.

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.

There's always something to write about. If there's not then you need to live life more aggressively.

If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.

This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me.

The key to non-anxious sermon-writing is that it’s not about me. It’s about the congregation. I honor the fact that the listeners bring more to the sermon than I do. I remind myself of the hundreds of times someone says, 'I loved how you said…' and then tell me things that they heard that were nowhere in my text and that I never said. But they heard what they needed to hear.

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

First you're an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity.

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

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

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.

See things as they are and write about them. Don’t waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.

If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Writing well means never having to say, 'I guess you had to be there.'

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair–the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it - the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.

All a good letter has to do is make you feel special.

It's not about the writing. It's about the feelings behind the words.

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

Even writers need relief from words.

A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned.

No letter from a lover is ever more welcome, brings more joy, than a publisher's expression of interest does to a new author!

Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, on the wall of a cell.

She was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.

I have never thought of writing as hard work, but I have worked hard to find a voice.

You can't think yourself out of a writing block, you have to write yourself out of a thinking block.

Stories don’t just make us matter to each other—maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.

There is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.

You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories.

Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.

I'm the least confident person in so many ways. But I believed that if somebody gave me the chance to tell a story, I would tell a story [well enough] that the person who gave me the chance would get their money back.

You go to movies to see people you love suffer - that's why you go to the movies. You don't go to see a movie about a guy who already knows he has a wonderful life.

I go to movies expecting to have a whole experience. If I want a movie that doesn't end, I'll go to a French movie. A movie has to be complete within itself; it can't just build off the first one or play variations.

It's very important that we start creating new content again. We can only build on nostalgia so much before we have nothing left to build on.

If I wrote what I really think, I would be so sad all the time. We create to fill a gap - not just to avoid the idea of dying, it's to fill some particular gap in ourselves.

I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.

All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

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.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.

Vigorous writing is concise.

Learn as much by writing as by reading.

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.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

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. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.

Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

The cure for writer's cramp is writer's block.

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.

There is nothing to write about, you say. Well then, write and let me know just this - that there is nothing to write about; or tell me in the good old style if you are well. That's right. I am quite well.

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.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

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.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations.

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it short.

More than kisses, letters mingle souls.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

Don't say it was 'delightful'; make us say 'delightful' when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers 'Please, will you do the job for me?'

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

It's a phonetic language. Anything can make sense. How do you think Dr. Seuss wrote any of that sh*t?

Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!

Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.

Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without annoying delays: don�t write about Man, write about 'a' man.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

If I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'

There is quite enough sorrow and shame amd suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

In the very books in which philosophers bid us scorn fame, they inscribe their names.

I don't care what is written about me, so long as it isn't true.

Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Every author should weigh his work and ask, 'Will humanity gain any benefit from it?'

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.

There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.

The writer�s job is not to judge, but to seek to understand.

To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.

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.

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.

The only right way of telling a story is to begin at the beginning--at the beginning of the world. Therefore all books have to be begun in the wrong way for the sake of brevity.

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth'' is less important than emotional sincerity.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.