Writing Quotes

• 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.

• 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.

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