Quotes About Writing

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.  ~ Don Marquis


Easy reading is damn hard writing.  ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne


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


I'm sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have time to make it shorter.  ~ George Bernard Shaw


Writer's block is a disease for which there is no cure, only respite.  ~ Terri Guillemets


The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.  ~ Samuel Johnson


There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.  ~ Maya Angelou


It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them.  The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.  ~ Joan Baez


Books want to be born: I never make them.  They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.  ~ Samuel Butler


Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.  ~ William Wordsworth


No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.  ~ Ezra Pound


Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.  ~ Benjamin Franklin


Everyone should always have two books with him, one to read and one to write in.  ~ Robert Louis Stevenson


Don't look at the world with your hands in your pockets. To write about it you have to reach out and touch it.  ~ Mark Twain


Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.  ~ Truman Capote


A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.  ~ Ernest Hemingway


I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.  ~ C.S. Lewis


The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.  ~ Mark Twain


No tears and the writer, no tears and the reader.  ~ Robert Frost


Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?  ~ Friedrich Nietzsche


Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.  ~ Lillian Hellman


Fiction is the truth inside the lie.  ~ Stephen King


If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.  ~ Benjamin Franklin


A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.  ~ Thomas Mann


To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.  ~ Albert Camus


A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.  ~ Mark Twain


There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.  ~ Ernest Hemingway


I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.  ~ Philip Pullman


A word after a word after a word is power.  ~ Margaret Atwood


Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.  ~ Gustave Flaubert


A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it to be God.  ~ Sidney Sheldon


The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.  ~ Ernest Hemingway


Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.  ~ Margaret Atwood


Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision. ~ Joseph Joubert


Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.  ~ Stephen King


Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.  ~ Colette


The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.  ~ Anatole France


All words are pegs to hang ideas on.  ~ Henry Ward Beecher


Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.  ~ E. B. White


A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.  ~ Friedrich Nietzsche


Writers are the engineers of human souls.  ~ Joseph Stalin


Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.  ~ Francis Bacon


Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.  ~ C.S. Lewis


Writing is both mask and unveiling.  ~ E. B. White


The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.  ~ Robert Frost


The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.  ~ Thomas Jefferson


I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.  ~ Blaise Pascal


A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.  ~ Karl Kraus


Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.  ~ Logan Pearsall Smith


Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.  ~ Olin Miller


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


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 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


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


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


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


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


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