Writing Quotes

Fundamentally all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying about the brief flicker of time we have here and the frustrations that it creates.

~ Mordecai Richler

I am what libraries and librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.

~ B. K. Sandwell

Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.

~ Saul Bellow

If you would be a reader read if a writer write.

~ Epictetus

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language trying to get human feelings right.

~ John K. Hutchens

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

~ E. M. Forster

Please never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.

~ Alexander Pushkin

The waste basket is a writer's best friend.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.

~ Hilaire Belloc

If a man means his writing seriously he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

~ John Ciardi

Words and sentences are subjects of revision paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.

~ Barrett Wendell

There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.

~ J. Middleton Murry

The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.

~ Robertson Davies

Now as through this world I ramble I see lots of funny men Some rob you with a six gun Some with a fountain pen.

~ Woody Guthrie

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.

~ Anaïs Nin

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

~ Virginia Woolf

Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.

~ Cyril Connolly

I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.

~ Charles Baudelaire

Writing has power but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind but they can't direct it. Time changes things God changes things the dictators change things but writers can't change anything.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

A good writer is basically a story-teller not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer when he tried to write of some particular day he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense but that ability is at the bottom of writing I am sure.

~ Maxwell Perkins

I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.

~ Maxwell Perkins

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

~ Maxwell Perkins

A memorandum is written to protect the writer - not to inform his reader.

~ Dean Acheson

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers dear Readers are an afterthought.

~ Gertrude Stein

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

~ George Orwell

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

~ Hugh Maclennan

You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you there of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right But where's the bloody horse?

~ Roy Campbell

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must seem to be inevitable.

~ Raymond Chandler

On the trail of another man the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.

~ Paul Murray Kendall

The editorial job has become unlike the ancient age when one judged what one read a job of making judgements on outlines ideas reputations previous books scenarios treatments talk and promises.

~ Sam Vaughan

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.

~ T. S. Eliot

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

~ Laurence Clark Powell

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.

~ Hilaire Belloc

How can you write if you can't cry?

~ Ring Lardner

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

~ Norman Mailer

As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.

~ Virginia Woolf

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

~ Ezra Pound

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

Your manuscript is both good and original but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good.

~ Samuel Johnson