Humor Quotes

The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.

~ Richard P. Denney

Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time -- life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.

~ Holly Lisle

Do not put statements in the negative form.And don't start sentences with a conjunction.If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that agreat deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.De-accession euphemisms.If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

~ William Safire

What are you going to do? Can't say - run for president, write - Greenwich Village? Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.

~ Mignon Mclaughlin

Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

~ Mark Twain

My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few words for her Husbands and Brothers page on What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing. I believe in encouraging aunts, when deserving; and, as there are many worse eggs than her knocking about the metrop, I had consented blithely. But I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew's devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don't wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

~ Tom Robbins

Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.

~ Meagan Spooner

I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.

~ Don Roff

I love working with my hands. My writing is rough, my paper bruised with ink stains.

~ Bauvard

Writing is turning life's worst moments into money.

~ J.p. Donleavy

If you hear voices, you’re a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you’re an author.

~ Dani Harper

Writing a novel is like going a great distance to take a small shit.

~ Harlan Ellison

I'm not trying to please anyone. I'm just trying to write a damn book.

~ Richard P. Denney

In the world of your story, your outline is like the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, your characters are all Atheists.

~ Jefferson Smith

I go with the flow but I write against it.

~ Tamara Jasmine Burrell

For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.

~ Stephen King

I'm the first to admit that I don't write right. Now, relax and enjoy the show! The sideshow, that is.

~ Lori R. Lopez

I would not employ an author to referee a Ping-Pong match. By their very nature they are biased and bloody-minded. Better put a fox in a henhouse than to ask an author to judge his peers. (in a letter to the Governor General about the GA's Literary Awards & his issue--among others--with the judging system, 1981)

~ Jack Mcclelland

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

~ Ring Lardner

It has been our experience that American houses insist on very comprehensive editing; that English houses as a rule require little or none and are inclined to go along with the author's script almost without query. The Canadian practice is just what you would expect--a middle-of-the-road course. We think the Americans edit too heavily and interfere with the author's rights. We think that the English publishers don't take enough editorial responsibility. Naturally, then, we consider our editing to be just about perfect. There's no doubt about it, we Canadians are a superior breed! (in a letter to author Margaret Laurence, dated May, 1960)

~ Jack Mcclelland

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

~ Truman Capote

There's a kid or some kids somewhere. I'll never know them. They're particle-puzzle-cubing right now. They might be mini-misanthropes from Moosefart, Montana. They might be demi-dystopians from Dogdick, Delaware. They dig my demonic dramas. The metaphysic maims them. They grasp the gravity. They'll duke it out with their demons. They'll serve a surfeit of survival skills. They won't be chronologically crucified.They'll shore up my shit. They'll radically revise it. They'll pass it along.

~ James Ellroy

People ask me all the time, Where do your ideas come from? So, to clear up this question...I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet!

~ C.k. Webb

Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?'A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.'You enjoy this duty?'He nodded.I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.

~ Roger Zelazny

Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.

~ Stephen Potter

It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest. It's like falling in love, only more so. It feels like something criminal. It feels like unspeakably wild sex. So, think: When you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakably wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it?

~ Carolyn See

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.

~ Jonathan Lethem

All trademarks, company names, registered names, products, characters, mottos, logos, jingles and catchphrases used or cited in this work are the property of their respective owners and have only been mentioned and or used as cultural references to enhance the narrative and in no way were used to disparage or harm the owners and their companies. It is the author's sincerest wish the owners of the cited trademarks, company names, etc. appreciate the success they have achieved in making their products household names and appreciate the free plug.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity! returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka. If someone does not write the way required, they never try to explain what is wrong, but just say: 'That bastard has gone and written another load of rubbish!

~ Anton Chekhov

I write what I want to read. If I were to write what I know, I'd be staring at a blank page forever.

~ R.j. Dennis

Stay humble as a writer: write on toilet paper.

~ Jonas Eriksson

Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie..

~ Geoffrey Hill

I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards.

~ Garth Marenghi

When you're writing what you love, it's the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.

~ Don Roff

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

~ Howard Nemerov

A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in 'Dracula' is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read 'Dracula.

~ Joe Queenan

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

~ E.b. White

Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.

~ Katrina Monroe