Writing Quotes

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.