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Every man usually has something he can do better
than anyone else. Usually it is reading his own
handwriting.
- Unknown
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out
of the hands of fools. Let's start with
typewriters
- Frank Lloyd Wright
(1868-1959)
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
- Groucho Marx
(1890 - 1977)
There is then creative reading as well as creative
writing
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his
lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.
- Rod Serling
Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing
and it becomes chronic in their sick minds.
- Juvenal (AD 60-130)
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what
I feel in the best and simplest way.
- Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)
Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise
terrific people--if only they'd stop writing.
- Laura Miller
from a salon.com review of the movie Finding Forrester
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes
him proud.
- W. H Auden
English-US poet, dramatist, editor
When I face the desolate impossibility of writing
500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me,
and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I
write one page and then another. One day's works
is all I can permit myself to contemplate.
- John Steinbeck
Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as
they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity
itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.
- Stephen Leacock
Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise.
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a
paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same
reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary
lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
- William Strunk, Jr.
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable
possession, and therefore are most economical in
its use.
- Mark Twain
Another thing that Bezard taught was how to take
notes and how to set up card files that are useful
a whole lifetime. If I had followed his advice,
today I would have a gold mine; none of my early
work would have been lost.
- Jean Guitton (1901-1999)
A Student's Guide to Intellectual Work [1951], Ch. 5:
Survival, with honor, that outmoded and
all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as
all-important to a writer. Those who do not last
are always more beloved since no one has to see
them in their long, dull, unrelenting,
no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights
that they make to do something as they believe it
should be done before they die. Those who die or
quit early and easy and with every good reason are
preferred because they are understandable and
human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are
more human and more beloved.
- Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)
I read and walked for miles at night along the
beach, writing bad blank verse and searching
endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out
of the darkness and change my life. It never
crossed my mind that that person could be me.
- Anna Quindlen
Writing is like cooking...if you spill something,
you should make it look like part of the act.
- John Keeble
Writing is a lot like sex. At first you do it
because you like it. Then you find yourself doing
it for a few close friends and people you like.
But if you're any good at all...you end up doing
it for money.
- Unknown
For a creative writer possession of the truth is
less important than emotional sincerity.
- George Orwell (1903-1950)
English novelist, critic
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated
from the man who wrote it.
- Unknown
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.
The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over
and let the beautiful stuff out.
- Ray Bradbury
Better to write for yourself and have no public,
than to write for the public and have no self.
- Cyril Connolly
Nothing, not love, not greed, not passion or
hatred, is stronger than a writer's need to change
another writer's copy.
- Arthur Evans
All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most
of us go on to greater things.
- Bobby Knight
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most
writers.
- T. S. Eliot
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It
should be thrown with great force.
- Dorothy Parker
All of the books in the world contain no more
information than is broadcast as video in a single
large American city in a single year. Not all bits
have equal value.
- Carl Sagan
Those who write clearly have readers, those who
write obscurely have commentators.
- Albert Camus
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I
wrote a long one instead.
- Mark Twain
The man who doesn't read good books has no
advantage over the man who can't read them.
- Mark Twain
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point
in writing.
- Kingsley Amis
Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is
like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.
- John Osborne
"Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write my books so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she must turn one more page. When people tell me I've kept them up all night, I feel like I've succeeded!"
--Sidney Sheldon
"You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed."
--Larry Niven
"Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks."
--Richard Curtis
"I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this."
-- Cormac McCarthy
"If you're a singer, you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes."
--Mickey Spillane
"Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you -- as if you haven't been told a million times already -- that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching."
--Harlan Ellison
"Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world."
--Tom Clancy
"There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder."
--Brian Aldiss
"My goal in life is to be the exact same person to you, whether you've met me for the first time or the 21st time. Your knowledge of me is there from the beginning in an honest, brutal sort of way. Get your writings to be there...in an honest, brutal sort of way, and you'll have found your true voice."
--Joyce Jace
"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader--not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon."
E.L. Doctorow
"I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all."
E. B. White
"If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing."
Kingsley Amis
"I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive."
Philip Roth
"Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing."
Melinda Haynes
"What is written without effort is in generally read without pleasure."
Samuel Johnson
"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead."
Samuel Goldwyn
"When we read, we stat at the beginning and continue until we reach the end. When we write, we start in the middle and fight our way out."
Vickie Karp
"I write for the same reason I breathe -- because if I didn't, I would die."
Isaac Asimov
"One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time, in others' minds."
Alfred Kazin
"To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author."
Charles Caleb Colton
"The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness."
Julia Ward Howe
"Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators."
Olin Miller
"Books are never finished they are merely abandoned."
Oscar Wilde
"The great art of writing is knowing when to stop."
Josh Billings
Bruce Barton, who made a name for himself years ago as a
writer and advertising man, was talking to a class of students about writing one evening. One of them asked him how he got his inspiration for his magazine articles.
"Well," Barton replied, "picture me sitting at breakfast in
the morning. As I sip my coffee, my wife glances down at
the floor and observes, 'Bruce, we really need a new dining
room rug. This one is wearing out.' Right there I have the
inspiration to write another article."
"The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas."
Linus Pauling
"The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the word instead of being pulled by them."
Raymond Chandler
"Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little."
Tom Stoppard
"The first step is to find out what you love -- and don't be practical about it. The second step is to start doing what you love immediately, in any small way possible. I've seen what happens to people when they get to do what they love. They light up. They glow. They have a kind of energy that's wonderful."
Barbara Sher
"Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep."
Catherine O'Hara
"At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night."
H. P. Lovecraft
"What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a check."
Brendan Francis
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
G. K. Chesterton
"No one is asking, let alone demanding, that you write. The world is not waiting with bated breath for your article or book. Whether or not you get a single word on paper, the sun will rise, the earth will spin, the universe will expand. Writing is forever and always a choice -- your choice."
Beth Mende Conny
"Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed."
P.G. Wodehouse
"It's an adrenaline surge rushing through your body. You have this spark of an idea that keeps threatening to burst into flames and you have to get the words out on paper to match this emotion or picture in your head. After this comes the work of cleaning up the mess that you made."
Janet West
"We write to taste life twice."
Anais Nin
"It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."
Robert Southey
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