The Write Quotes
Quotations about all aspects of writing
Quotes about Writers and Writing
Quotes about Poets and Poetry
Quotes about Books and Reading
Quotes about Editors and Editing
Quotes about Publishers and Publishing
Quotes about Critics and Criticism
Quotes about Creativity
Motivational Quotes
Quotes about Writers and Writing
Good work doesn't happen with inspiration. It comes with constant, often tedious and deliberate effort. If your vision of a writer involves sitting in a cafe, sipping an aperitif with one's fellow geniuses, become a drunk. It's easier and far lessexhausting. - William Hefferman
Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. Itis one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it. - Michael Crichton
In composing, as a general rule, run a pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style. - Sydney Smith
Only a mediocre writer is always at his best. - Somerset Maugham
Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead. - Gene Fowler
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. - Francois Rene Chateaubriand
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. - Robert Charles Benchley, author
Art is the manipulation of someone else's imagination. - Sol Saks, Funny Business
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. - Robert Frost:
If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit. - Stephen King
Your characters change you. In coming to know them, you come to know an unacknowledged part of yourself. In working out their destinies in the pages of your writing, your characters work out something within you, too. - Susan Shaughnessy
Journalism allows its readers to witness history;
fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it. - John Hersey
When you're a writer,
you no longer see things with the freshness
of the normal person. - Brian Moore
Writing is rewriting...
If you fall in love with the vision you want of
your work and not your words,
the rewriting will become easier. - Nora DeLoach
A writer is a person for whom writing
is more difficult than it is for other people - Thomas Mann
Human beings have been telling stories
and listening to stories as long
as there have been human beings... - Barbara Shapiro
I've always believed in writing
without a collaborator, because where two people are writing
the same book, each believes he gets all the worries
and only half the royalties. - Agatha Christie
Read a ton of books
before you presume to write your own.
Live an interesting life.
Write and prepare to be rejected. - Larry Baker
A well-written life is almost
as rare as a well-spent one. - Thomas Carlyle
Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing...I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. - Ernest Hemingway
Easy reading
is damn hard writing. - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Good characters the reader cares about
combined with an intriguing plot.
Do those two and you've got it made. - Bob Mayer
The fictional eye sees in,
through, and around what is really there. - Eudora Welty
Because all writers are human beings first
and writers second, my guess is that any advice
for living with a writer is about the same
as advice for living with a plumber
or a refrigerator salesperson. - Clyde Edgerton
The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature,
but too much today is written
from small mirrors in vanity cases. = John Mason Brown
Imagination and fiction
make up more than three-quarters
of our real life. - Simone Weil
The first thing you have to consider
when writing a novel
is your story, and then your story--
and then your story! - Ford Madox Ford
You have to want to write and like to write.
Sit down at that desk or machine or laptop and tell stories. - Linda Fairstein
Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. - Franklin P. Adams
I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock
every morning. -William Faulkner
The effort involved in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a novel, where everything must be defined in the first paragraph: structure, tone, style, rhythm, length, and sometimes even the personality of a character. -Prologue -'Strange Pilgrims' - Gabriel Gacia Marquez
Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed. - P.G. Wodehouse
My stories run up and bite me in the leg -- I respond by writing down
everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go
and runs off. And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and
foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a
privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us.
Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. - Ray Bradbury
I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters. - James A Michener
To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose. - Eudora Welty
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. - W. Somerset Maugham
Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can't forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released. - Natalie Goldberg
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be. - Doris Lessing
The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story--and then your story! - Ford Madox Ford
Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush. - Pete Murphy
Anybody can write a short story --a bad one, I mean-- who has industry and paper and time enough; but not everyone may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills. The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more that he makes haste to blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature has certain rigths; instinct--the instinct of self-preservation-- forbids that any man(cheered and supported by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in weeks. - Robert Louis Stevenson, My first book "Treasure Island"
If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies. - William Faulkner
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That ist o say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. - Ezra Pound
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. - Ernest Hemingway
I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, "I will tell you a story," and then he passes the hat. - Robertson Davies
What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window. - Rudolph Erich Rascoe
I'm not a big believer in disciplined writers. What does discipline mean? The writer who forces himself to sit down and write for seven hours every day might be wasting those seven hours if he's not in the mood and doesn't feel the juice. I don't discipline equals creativity. - Bret Easton Ellis
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation. - Graham Greene
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream. - Joan Didion
Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years. - Alex Haley
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing.The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. - Margaret Atwood
There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed. - John Kenneth Galbraith
When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day. - Alberto Moravia
An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment,both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself. - Irwin Shaw
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die. - Isaac Asimov
I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell. - William Styron
What is written without effort is in generally read without pleasure. - Samuel Johnson
Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life. - Lawrence Kasdan
On the whole, audiences prefer that art be not a mirror held upto life, but a Disneyland of the soul, containing Romanceland, Spyland, Pornoland and all the other escapelands which are so much more agreeable than the complex truth. - Geoffrey Wiseman
If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead & rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing. - Benjamin Franklin
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Writing is a struggle between presence and absence. - Lu Ji
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it. - Samuel Johnson
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children. - Madeleine L'Engle
Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. - Samuel Johnson
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea. -Thomas Mann
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. - Rudyard Kipling
The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to makesense. - Tom Clancy
Once you start rewriting, you're not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it. - Barry N. Malzberg
...talents of the novelist:...observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations... - Virginia Woolf
Next to the originator of a sentence is the first quoter of it. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves. - Lillian Hellman
It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer. - W. Somerset Maugham
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent. - James Baldwin
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me,Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us. - William Faulkner
For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity. - George Orwell
That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave,and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which bookwriters as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good. - Raymond Chandler
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer. - G. C. Lichtenberg
An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children. - Benjamin Disraeli
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them. - Elie Wiesel
No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one. - Robert Byrne
When I am dead,I hope it may be said:"His sins were scarlet,but his books were read." - Hilaire Belloc
I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books. - Isaac Asimov
Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors. - Pablo Picasso
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer. - Margaret Atwood
Getting even is one reason for writing. - William Gass
Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. - Georges Simonen
Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak. - Tirso de Molina
Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory. - Irwin Shaw
I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, becausewhere two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties. - Agatha Christie
Close the door. Write with _no one_ looking over your shoulder.Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you;figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing youhave to offer. - Barbara Kingsolver
However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once. - Jean Jacques Rousseau
No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside. -Stephen King
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. - Muriel Rukeyser
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge. - H.G. Wells
Quotes about Poets and Poetry
Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. - Dylan Thomas
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. - Robert Frost
Quotes about Books and Reading
Nothing beats a good book. - Nunzio Nappi
A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments. - Joyce Cary
A book is not an end in itself;
it is only a way to touch someone--
a bridge extended across a space of
loneliness and obscurity. - Isabel Allende
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds,
but into my own. I learned who I was and
who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and
what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. - Anna Quindlen
These are not books,
lumps of lifeless paper,
but minds alive on the shelves. - Gilbert Highet
Temples fall, statues decay, mausoleums perish,
eloquent phrases declaimed are forgotten,
but good books are immortal. - William Vernon
The real purpose of books
is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. - Christopher Morley
A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. - William Styron
The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you. - W. Somerset Maugham
I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve. - Montesquieu
When I get hold of a book I particularly admire, I am so enthusiastic that I loan it to someone who never brings it back. - Edgar Watson Howe
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company. - Andre Gide
I don't want to just mess with your head. I want to mess with your life.... I want you to miss appointments, burn dinner, skip your homework. I want you to tell your wife to take that moonlight stroll on the beach at Waikiki with the resort tennis pro while you read a few more chapters. - Stephen King
The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination. - Elizabeth Hardwick
Quotes about Editors and Editing
There are two kinds of editors, those who correct your copy and those who say it's wonderful. - Theodore H. White
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. - T. S. Eliot
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft. - William Shakespeare
You ask for the distinction between 'Editor' and 'Publisher': an editor selects manuscripts; a publisher selects editors. - Max Schuster
The writer who can't do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won't dream of sharing his royalties with that editor. - Alfred Knopf
Everyone needs an editor. - Tim Foote
Editors seek out the first novels with the seductiveness of DonJuans; the pleasure of discovery is one of the obvious reasons. - William Targ
I see my [editorial] role as helping the writer to realize he or her intention. I never want to impose any other goal on the writer, and I never want the book to be mine. - Faith Sale
The job of an editor in a publishing house is the dullest, hardest, most exciting, exasperating and rewarding of perhaps any job in the world. - John Hall Wheelock
Not all writers can work with all editors. A project that is taken on with great enthusiasm by an editor may bog down because the chemistry isn't right. - Betty A. Prashker
'The New York Times' list is a bunch of crap. They ought to call it the editor's choice. It sure isn't based on sales. - Howard Stern
The successful editor is one who is constantly finding newwriters, nurturing their talents, and publishing them with critical and financial success. - A. Scott Berg
One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception - at least some of the time, incompetent or crazy. - John Gardner
Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers. - John Farrar
Quotes about Publishers and Publishing
That's very nice if they want to publish you, but don't pay too much attention to it. It will toss you away. Just continue to write. - Natalie Goldberg
Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being. - A. A. Milne
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps. - Robert Benchley
Publishing is no longer simply a matter of picking worthy manuscripts and putting them on offer. It is now as important to market books properly, to work with the bookstore chains to getterms, co-op advertising, and the like. The difficulty is that publishers who can market are most often not the publishers with worthy lists. - Olivia Goldsmith
The publisher is a middleman, he calls the tune to which the whole rest of the trade dances; and he does so because he pays the piper. - Geoffrey Faber
One of the signs of Napoleon's greatness is the fact that he once had a publisher shot. - Siegfried Unseld
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
In the publishing business you have to learn to greet failure with the same handshake as you would success. - Eddie Bell
Publishers are all cohorts of the devil; there must be a special hell for them somewhere. - Goethe
As difficult as it is for a writer to find a publisher -admittedly a daunting task - it is twice as difficult for a publisher to sort through the chaff, select the wheat, and profitably publish a worthy list. - Olivia Goldsmith
We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity. - from The Humanist Association of Canada Spring 1992 Newsletter, which also noted "For writers only - Every writer has received rejection slips; too many of them for most. The "Financial Times" has quoted the 'mother of all rejection slips', translated from a Chinese economic journal.
Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away. - Clarence Darrow
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure. - Oliver Herford
I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money. - Dorothy Parker
For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded. - Sir James M. Barrie
Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be. - V. S. Pritchett
No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. - Samuel Johnson
Quotes about Critics and Criticism
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again; but who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails,at least fails while daring greatly, so that his space shall never be one with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt
Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a statue in honor of a critic. Jean Sibelius
Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done,they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves. - Brendan Francis Behan
Asking a working writer what he feels about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs. - John Osborne
It's those damn critics again. - Irwin Shaw
There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book. - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
I am forced to say that I have many fiercer critics than myself. - Irwin Shaw
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself,but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance.Writing is, after all, a form of communication. - Ralph Ellison
Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen. - George Jean Nathan
Quotes about Creativity
The creative person is flexible -- he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not
threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are. - Frank Goble
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. - Charles Mingus
Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected. -William Plomer
The X-Factor is that thing that distinguishes the artist from the workman, the journeyman from the master... -Author Unknown
Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training. - Anna Freud
There is a correlation between the creative and the screwball. So we must suffer the screwball gladly. - Kingman Brewster
Anyone can look for history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store. - Robert Wieder
Imagination rules the world. - Napoleon Bonaparte
Motivational Quotes
As is our confidence, so is our capacity. - William Hazlitt
Defeat is a fact and victory can be a fact. If the idea is good, it will survive defeat, it may even survive the victory. - Steven Vincent Benet
Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes. - Ned Rorem
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught. - Oscar Wilde
It may be that those who do most, dream most. - Stephen Leacock
