Writing Quotes

Begin with another's to end with your own.

~ Baltasar Gracián

Dr. Johnson's sayings would not appear so extraordinary were it not for his bow-wow way.

~ Henry Herbert

Every other author may aspire to praise the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.

~ Samuel Johnson

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

~ Henry Kissinger

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.

~ William Stafford

I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.

~ William Stafford

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

~ Charles Darwin

In Ireland a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.

~ Anonymous

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.

~ W. H. Auden

Make'em laugh make 'em cry make 'em wait.

~ Charles Reade

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

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Memoirs: the backstairs of history.

~ George Meredith

No tears and the writer no tears and the reader.

~ Robert Frost

The pen is mightier than the sword.

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James 1st James 2nd and the Old Pretender.

~ Philip Guedalla

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth the publishing to find honest men to publish it and to get sensible men to read it.

~ C. C. Colton

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

~ Oscar Wilde

Thought flies and words go on foot.

~ Julien Green

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

~ Albert Camus

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

~ Logan Pearsall Smith

When my journal appears many statues must come down.

~ Duke Of Wellington

Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

~ Georges Simenon

Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.

~ Rabbi Israel Salanter

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

~ J. P. Donleavy

You cannot write in the chimney with charcoal.

~ Russian Proverb

The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.

~ Saul Bellow

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take of care themselves.

~ Lewis Carroll

There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism in a sense to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses their meannesses to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat as it were without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction.

~ Saul Bellow

I can write better than anyone who can write faster and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.

~ A. J. Liebling

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.

~ Northrop Frye

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names identities personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

~ Mel Brooks

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

~ Joan Didion

The writer must write what he has to say not speak it.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.

~ Daphne Du Maurier

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

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

The beginning is easy what happens next is much harder.

~ Anonymous

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

~ Robert Graves

If we try to envisage an 'average Canadian writer' we can see him living near a campus teaching at least part-time at university level mingling too much for his work's good with academics doing as much writing as he can for the CBC and always hoping for a Canada Council Fellowship.

~ George Woodcock

The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre