The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
George Bernard Shaw
I wrote a thousand words every day.
Jack London
The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
Benjamin Disraeli
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
Edgar Allan Poe
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
Tennessee Williams
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
Ernest Hemingway
Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
Laurence Sterne
Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.
Carol Burnett
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
John Updike
Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem, or saying a prayer.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The desire to write grows with writing.
Desiderius Erasmus
I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
Erica Jong
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
Sir Francis Bacon
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
John Ruskin
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
Ronald Reagan
This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.
George F. Burns
Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing.
Randy K. Milholland
This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me.
Colleen Wainwright
Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
John Adams
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
Jules Renard
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Jules Renard
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you're doing, or it comes out flat. You can't fake your way through this.
Real Live Preacher
I write because I'm afraid to say some things out loud.
Real Live Preacher
The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.
Robert Anderson
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson
Good writing takes more than just time; it wants your best moments and the best of you.
Real Live Preacher
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Robert A. Heinlein
I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.
Samuel Goldwyn
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.
H. G. Wells
If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.
Elaine Liner
If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.
Real Live Preacher
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
Josh Billings
Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
Katherine Paterson
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
I think people want their illusions and writers are mostly illusion. When you read their words, you read a flattened, incomplete version of the writer.
Real Live Preacher
The key to non-anxious sermon-writing is that it's not about me. It's about the congregation. I honor the fact that the listeners bring more to the sermon than I do. I remind myself of the hundreds of times someone says, 'I loved how you said…' and then tell me things that they heard that were nowhere in my text and that I never said. But they heard what they needed to hear.
Reverend Sean Parker Dennison
I write constantly, but only in my journals. I have three of them: one for travel, one for home, and one I write in before bed. But the last thing I want is other people reading it..... What's really fun is reading your journal, like a year later, or.
Cameron Diaz
Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.
Derrick Jensen
Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
Edward Gibbon
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
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
Iris Murdoch
Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
Olin Miller
The cure for writer's cramp is writer's block.
Inigo DeLeon
Metaphorically these essays move as a quiet but observant coast-guard cutter among the rocks and islands up and down the littoral of our life.
David Mccord
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
Russell Baker
I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law.
Taslima Nasrin
Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.
Dean Koontz
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
Daphne du Maurier
Writing is a craft not an art.
William Zinsser
See things as they are and write about them. Don't waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.
Real Live Preacher
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
Jose Saramago
Perhaps what I do not manage to operate rapidly enough is the passage between the outside and the inside.
Helene Cixous
Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.
Arthur Miller
The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people.
George Dennison Prentice
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.
Isaac Asimov
Vigorous writing is concise.
William Strunk Jr.
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
Stephen King
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble.
Arab Proverb
If the truth is there, bad writing won't hurt it !
Alfred Adler
Writing only leads to more writing.
Sidonie Gabrielle
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Stephen King
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
Leo Rosten
The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.
Dave Barry
You ask me why I do not write something....I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.
Florence Nightingale
My pen is my razor, and I've been bleeding.
Anthony Beal
When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one.
M. F. K. Fisher
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J. P. Donleavy
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries
Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
David Sedaris
Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
Gao Xingjian
Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
Thomas Berger
I felt like writing about a time when I was probably, and I think all of us are, the happiest in our lives-before the obligations start in.
Neil Simon
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion
Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
Aaron Sorkin
I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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 Benchley
The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.
Benjamin Britten
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
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Gloria Steinem
In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.
Pliny the Elder
All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
Bobby Knight
Authorship, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, is an infancy, a pastime, a labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, or a virtue.
August Wilhelm Von Schlegel
My stories run up and bite me on the leg-I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
Ray Bradbury
There are a lot of people who can't write and maybe shouldn't write.
Sarah Hepola
The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.
Jeff Jarvis
Written reports stifle creativity.
H Ross Perot
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Jessamyn West
A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.
Robert S. McNamara
Writing is like this-you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.
Paul Engle
Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.
Fran Lebowitz
But when the pen is in his hand he has to write by itch and twitch, though certainly his itch and twitch are intimately conditioned by all his past itching and twitching, and by all his past theorizing about them.
John Ciardi
I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.
Ingrid Bergman
The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.
John Burroughs
People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.
W. Somerset Maugham
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
Jack Lemon
If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.
Victor Hugo
Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of meditation- an investigation of my own life. It has nothing to do with "I've got to get another play.
Neil Simon
For me, writing [was] a question of survival...I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in.
Gao Xingjian
He writes so well he makes me feel like putting the quill back in the goose.
Fred Allen
Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.
Maimonides
When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools.
Michael Leboeuf
The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
William Styron
Sometimes he advertises himself assiduously, writing a few words and then rushing to the talk show to wave his flag.
Herbert Gold
Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.
Jesse Stuart
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
Francis Bacon, Sr.
I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.
Mavis Gallant
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
Solomon Short
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
Gustave Flaubert
The waste basket is the writer's best friend.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
W. Somerset Maugham
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
Ray Bradbury
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
Havelock Ellis
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
Herman Melville
Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
William Zinsser
Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.
Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one's first productions.
Andre Maurois
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
Raymond Chandler
Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere . . .You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.
Anne Lamott
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
John Lecarre
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Sidonie Gabrielle
I always wrote with the idea that what I put out there is going to stay there. Once I publish something, it has been published. I've never deleted more than one or two posts from my site. I don't think that there are takebacks. I don't feel right about it.
Alison Headley
First you're an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity.
Martin Myers
Writing well mean never having to say, 'I guess you had to be there.'
Jef Mallett
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
Henry James
We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.
George Saintsbury
There is nothing to write about, you say. Well then, write and let me know just this - that there is nothing to write about; or tell me in the good old style if you are well. That's right. I am quite well.
Pliny the Younger
I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
Honore De Balzac
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
Edith Wharton
Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword.
Edward G. Bulwer lytton
When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.
Gao Xingjian
I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
Marcel Proust
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
John Irving
I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
Henri Matisse
A book comes and says, "Write me." My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.
Madeleine L'Engle
I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.
Wilfrid Sheed
Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.
Heather Armstrong
If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.
Lord Byron
I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?
Philip Larkin
There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.
Saul Bellow
This is the image from which he was born...... Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility......the characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them and equally horrified by them......
Milan Kundera
An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
Charles de Montesquieu
After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.
George Ade
Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram.
Lance Morrow
Writing is the supreme solace.
William Somerset Maugham
Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling, and good expression; it is having wit, soul, and taste, all together.
George louis Leclerc De Buffon
A mediocre mind thinks it writes divinely; a good mind thinks it writes reasonably.
Jean De La Bruyere
Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.
Stanislaw J. Lec
Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read; and the.
H Ross Perot
Write injuries in sand, kindnesses in marble.
French Proverb
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
Thomas Carlyle
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Edwin Schlossberg
Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.
Cardinal Richelieu
Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It's the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.
Rhys Alexander
A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.
Tom Bissell
It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules.
Eric A. Burns
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
Anthony Burgess
You must not come lightly to the blank page.
Stephen King
Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.
Mario Vargas Llosa
What a writer brings to any story is an attitude.
John Gregory Dunne
The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
William Saroyan
Writing is very much a playground; an artistic playground. It's the most fun thing I do.
Shania Twain
The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.
Sir Winston Churchill
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
George Orwell
Good writing is like a windowpane.
George Orwell
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.
George Orwell
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Edward Dahlberg
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
Elias Canetti
Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.
Elie Wiesel
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
Eudora Welty
We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.
Nikki Giovanni
That everybody is allowed to learn to read spoileth in the long run not only writing but thinking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In order to write about life, first you must live it!
Ernest Hemingway
Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.
Galileo Galilei
He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows.
Oscar Wilde
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
Oscar Wilde
He was one of those men who think that the world can be saved by writing a pamphlet.
Benjamin Disraeli
The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the opportunity.
John F. Kennedy
No instance exists of a person's writing two languages perfectly. That will always appear to be his native language which was most familiar to him in his youth.
Thomas Jefferson
Writing a poem is discovering.
Robert Frost
I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
Robert Frost
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause and say, 'Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.'
Martin Luther King Jr.
The last thing I have to say is that ice is the past tense of water. I've always wanted to write that sentence and now I have.
Rita Mae Brown
I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.
Jack London
And thus I clothe my naked villainy With old odd ends, stol'n forth of holy writ; And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
William Shakespeare
To be a well-flavored man is the gift of fortune, but to write or read comes by nature.
William Shakespeare
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Aldous Huxley
Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.
Horace Mann
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway
I can't believe it! Reading and writing actually paid off!
Matt Groening
Copyright © 2024 Electric Goat Media. All Rights Reserved.