Writing Quotes

• 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.

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

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