Writing Quotes

I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth.

~ Henry Miller

For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written ... she is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in them but now they seem hardly to belong to her - and probably she is involved with another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.

~ Rumer Godden

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

~ Logan Pearsall Smith

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

~ George Bernard Shaw

I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.

~ Washington Irving

That's not writing that's typing.

~ Truman Capote

There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis of details. I often say that one must permit oneself and quite advisedly and deliberately a certain margin of misstatement.

~ Benjamin N. Cardozo

I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.

~ T. S. Eliot

I think with my right hand.

~ Edmund Wilson

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

~ Joseph Stalin

I quote others in order to better express my own self.

~ Michel De Montaigne

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

~ Edith Sitwell

The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.

~ Theodore Isaac Rubin

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself- it is the occurring which is difficult.

~ Stephen Leacock

Writing when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

~ Laurence Sterne

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Caesar had perished from the world of men Had not his sword been rescued by his pen.

~ Henry Vaughan

Every great and original writer in proportion as he is great and original must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

~ William Wordsworth

Writers write to influence their readers their preachers their auditors but always at bottom to be more themselves.

~ Aldous Huxley

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

~ Edith Wharton

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

~ Virginia Woolf

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Get black on white.

~ Guy De Maupassant

It is a sobering thought that each of us gives his hearers and his readers a chance to look into the inner working of his mind when he speaks or writes.

~ J. M. Barker

Read over your compositions and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine strike it out.

~ Samuel Johnson

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human and he responds emotionally but at the same time there's this cold observer who cannot cry.

~ Brian Moore

The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book I assure you.

~ Samuel Johnson

The obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity.

~ Quintilian

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.

~ Edna Ferber

Just get it down on paper and then we'll see what to do with it.

~ Maxwell Perkins

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

~ E. B. White

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words a paragraph no unnecessary sentences for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline but that every word tell.

~ William Strunk

Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons he would lose his angels.

~ Dakin Williams

Self-expression is for babies and seals where it can be charming. A writer's business is to affect the reader.

~ Vincent Mchugh

There is but one art to omit.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win hold or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.

~ John Mason Brown

Write something even if it's just a suicide note.

~ Anonymous

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

~ Roland Barthes