Writing Quotes

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either schola...

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either schola...

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer sh...

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one ...

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I ...

The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance...

The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly ...

It will be sent that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and ...

This recognition of the truth we get in the artist’s work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. ...

…After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story ...

I hate writing, I love having written.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the r...

Hold your pen and spare your voice.

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do the...

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax ...

Slartibartfast's study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library.

And I write novels!" chimed in the other cop. "Though I haven't had any of them published yet, so I ...

Adams has done a bit of everything, from radio to television to designing computer games. Not all of...

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died stan...

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.

When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - ...

I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Ear...

I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Ro...

Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subjec...

It has often been saidthere’s so much to be read,you never can cramall those words in your head.So t...

I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I'll probably... drop wr...

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been adde...

In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abed...

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man wr...

The best writing is rewriting.

Remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself.

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Child...

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

I have seldom met an individual of literary tastes or propensities in whom the writing of love was n...

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are...

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make o...

Every night, before he turned in, he would write in the book. He wrote about things he had done, thi...

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the...

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make...

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and th...

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present gene...

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or...

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except th...

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Most of us are pseudo-scholars...for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Chur...

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but openin...

There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they mus...

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about...

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to acc...

Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance...

I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed in keeping rabbits.

In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into wh...

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing wh...

True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.

I think with my right hand.

Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule ...

What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.

I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spo...

The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.

Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the d...

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the he...

The words ran away with me.

It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic abs...

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a ...

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Still must the poet as of old,In barren attic bleak and cold,Starve, freeze, and fashion verses toSu...

I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived; I'm demanding that ...

The StadiumHave you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and list...

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is o...

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, e...

Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: th...

As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and o...

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark cor...

Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks thin...

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really l...

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it...

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work — one that is just about respect...