A.A. Milne
“Almost anyone can become an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.”
Anaïs Nin
“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”
André Gide
“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”
Anna Quindlen
“People have writer’s block not because they can’t write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.”
Anton Chekhov
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
Arthur Polotnik
“You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.”
Ben Franklin
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
Benjamin Cavell
“The drudgery of being a professional writer comes in trying to make good days out of bad days and in squeezing out the words when they won’t just flow.”
Bulwer-Lytton
“The pen is mightier than the sword.”
Burton Rascoe
“What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.”
C. Astrid Weber
“The coroner will find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys.”
C.S. Lewis
“A book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.”
Charles Caleb Colton
“Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.”
Charles Caleb Colton
“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 Peguy
“A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”
Christopher Hampton
“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs.”
E. L. Doctorow
“Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.”
Edmund Morrison
“Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.”
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
“Writers are the main landmarks of the past.”
Elias Canetti
“The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.”
Elie Wiesel
“Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.”
Elmore Leonard
“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”
Erica Jong
“When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it’s a wonderful way to spend one’s life.”
Ernest Hemingway
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward.”
Flaubert
“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”
G.C. Lichtenberg
“The mark of a really great writer is that he or she gives expression to what the masses of mankind think or feel without knowing it. The mediocre writer simply writes what everyone would have said.”
Henry David Thoreau
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
“Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”
Henry Ward Beecher
“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”
Horace
“You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don’t labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.”
Isaac Asimov
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”
“I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer
“The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.”
J. P. Donleavy
“Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.”
Jack London
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
Jack Smith
“I’d rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer.”
James Michener
“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
“I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.”
Japanese Proverb
“Better to write down something one time than to read something ten times.”
Jessamyn West
“Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential.”
John K. Hutchens
“A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.”
John Steinbeck
“Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.”
“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”
Joseph Pulitzer
“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.”
Kingsley Amis
“If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”
Logan Pearsall Smith
“What I like in a good author isn’t what he says, but what he whispers.”
Lord Byron
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing … I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
Mark Twain
“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
“The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.”
“Experience is an author’s most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.”
Maxim Gorky
“You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.”
Mignon McLaughlin
“An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners’ names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.”
Natalie Goldberg
“Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the centre of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
Norbet Platt
“The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.”
Norman Cousins
“Words need to be crafted, not sprayed. They need to be fitted together with infinite care.”
Orson Scott Card
“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.”
Pearl S. Buck
“If you start to revise before you’ve reached the end, you’re likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.”
Peter De Vries
“I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.”
Ray Bradbury
“You’ve got to love libraries. You’ve got to love books. You’ve got to love poetry. You’ve got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.”
“Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.”
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
Raymond Chandler
“The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”
Richard Bach a.k.a. Stephen King
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”
Richard Curtis
“Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.”
Richard Harding Davis
“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.”
Richard North Patterson
“Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing.”
Robert Benchley
“The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
“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.”
Robert Cormier
“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.”
Robert Frost
“There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.”
Rudyard Kipling
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
Samuel Johnson
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
Sholem Asch
“Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.”
Sidney Sheldon
“Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the 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.”
Sinclair Lewis
“It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.”
Stephen Leacock
“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.”
T. S. Eliot
“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”
Toni Morrison
“If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Vita Sackville-West
“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”
Vladimir Nabakov
“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.”
W. H. Auden
“In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.”
W. H. Auden
“No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.”
Walter Bagehot
“Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.”
Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith
“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
Wilbur Smith
“I’m a writer. If I stop writing, I’m nothing.”
Winston Churchill
“Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”