Quotes On Writing (Page 2)

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever. ~ Oscar Wilde


If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write. ~ Epictetus


Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. ~ Mark Twain


I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. ~ Peter De Vries


You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.  ~ Maurice Sendak


There is probably no hell for authors in the next world. They suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.  ~ Christian Bovee


All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.  ~ Leo Tolstoy


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.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.  ~ Virginia Woolf


There's no right way of writing. There's only your way.  ~ Milton Lomask


Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.  ~ Robert Frost


Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.  ~ Willa Cather


A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.  ~ Vladimir Nabokov


Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.  ~ Lloyd Alexander


People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. ~ Henry David Thoreau


People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars. ~ Ernest Hemingway


Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. ~ James Norman Hall


The point of good writing is knowing when to stop. ~ L. M. Montgomery


It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense. ~ Mark Twain


My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. ~ Ernest Hemingway


Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. ~ Jules Renard


Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader. ~ Joseph Joubert


You can make anything by writing. ~ C.S. Lewis


Most editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.  ~ T.S. Eliot


Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.  ~ Robert Frost


Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.  ~ Gene Fowler


I write out of instinct.  ~ Jerome Weidman


The point of good writing is knowing when to stop.  ~ L.M. Montgomery


It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.  ~ Gerald Brenan


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.  ~ Mark Twain


A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.  ~ Stephen King


Every writer I know has trouble writing.  ~ Joseph Heller


The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness. ~ Julia Ward Howe


Writing is the geometry of the soul. ~ Plato


The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. ~ Albert Camus


A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.  ~ Robert Frost


You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. ~ Saul Bellow


The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. ~ Gustave Flaubert


The only reason I didn't kill myself after I read the reviews of my first book was because we have two rivers in New York and I couldn't decide which one to jumo into.  ~ Wilfrid Sheed


Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become. ~ C.S. Lewis


I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. ~ Mark Twain


Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. ~ Francis Bacon


The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.  ~ Robert Louis Stevenson


I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.  ~ Ernest Hemingway


Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons. ~  Robertson Davies


Asking a writer what he thinks about critics is like asking what a fire hydrant feels about dogs.  ~ Ann Landers


I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami.  ~ Stephen King


The only advice I have to give a young novelist is to fuck a really good agent.  ~ John Cheever


Seventeen publishers rejected the manuscript, at which time we knew we had something pretty hot.  ~ Kinky Friedman


I thought to myself, 'why not write a bestseller?' In the first place, more people buy them and more people read them. You make more money and it doesn’t take any more time to write a bestseller than it does to write a book nobody buys.  ~ George Burns


The man is either crazy or he is a poet.  ~ Horace


When ideas come, I write them down; when they don't come, I don't.  ~ William Faulkner


My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.  ~ George Bernard Shaw


The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.  ~ Eleanor Roosevelt


Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.  ~ Jules Renard


I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.  ~ Norman Mailer


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