| WriTiNg QuOtEs |
| Poetry is like fish. If it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat. - Osbert Sitwell . If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing. - Kingsley Amis . Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. - TS Eliot . Author: A fool, who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting the generations to come. - Montesqieu . There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. - Flannery O'Connor . Substitute 'damn' everytime you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. - Mark Twain . If you did not write everyday, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both - you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. - Ray Bradbury . I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams . The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein . Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for. - Mark Twain . Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. - Mark Twain . There's nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and open up a vein. - Walter Smith . The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. - Mary Heaton Vorse . Multiple exclamation points are a sure sign of a diseased mind. - Terry Pratchett . Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try. - Fran Lebowitz . The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it. - Leo Rosten . A good many 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 not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. - Robert Heinlein . 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 . A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. - Thomas Mann . We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to. - W. Somerset Maugham . The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything. - Walter Bagehot . There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. - W. Somerset Maugham . A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about the author. - GK Chesterton . From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed in laughter. Some day I intend reading it. - Groucho Marx . This book fills a much-needed gap. - Moses Hadas . This novel is not to be put lightly aside, but hurled with great force. - Dorothy Parker . I feel at times that I'm making up these little people and I've lost my mind. - Carolyn Chute . I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world. - Russell Baker . Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. - Dan Marquis . 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 don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens. - EB White . ...You have absolute right to write about the people you know and love...the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them. - Dorothy Allison . I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. - Mark Twain . I think I did pretty well considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper. - Steve Martin . Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. - Ben Franklin . The first draft of everything is shit. - Ernest Hemingway . It took fifteen years for me to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. - Robert Bradley . Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed. - Leo Rosten . You can't sit around and wait for inspiration to strike. You have to go after it with a club. - Jack London . Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. - Jules de Gaultier . If I had to give young writers advice, I'd say don't listen to writers talking about writing. - Lillian Hellman . One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel. - John Gardner . A blank page is God's way of showing you just how hard it is to be God. - Anon . Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. - Sholem Asch . Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. - EL Doctorow . The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. - Andre Gide . If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be put in a gas chamber. - John P Marquand . Words, of course, are the most powerful drug used by mankind. - Rudyard Kipling . I've known a number of truly talented writers who did less than they could have because they weren't vain and unpleasent enough about their talent. - Norman Mailer . Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing. - Burke . You will find poetry nowhere, unless you bring some with you. - Joubert . Of all kinds of ambition, that which pursues poetical fame is the wildest. - Goldsmith . All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay and present praise. - Colton . Poetry is the intellect colored by feelings. - Alexander Wilson . [Poetry is] thoughts that breathe and words that burn. - Gray . Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. - Plato . God wove a web of loveliness, of clouds and stars and birds, but made not anything at all so beautiful as words. - Anna Hempstead Branch . There are words which sever hearts more than sharp swords; there are words the point of which sting the heart through the course of a whole life. - Frederika Bremer . Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. - Friedrich Nietzsche . Any man who will look into his heart and honestly write what he sees there, will find plenty of readers. - Ed Howe . The writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge, and takes from him the least time. - Sydney Smith . Writing is like religion. Every man who feels the call must work out his own salvation. - George Horace Lorimer . When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." - Hilliare Belloc . The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible. - TS Eliot . Beware of the man who denounces women writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell. - Erica Jong . Write something, even if it's just a suicide note. - Gore Vidal . What would I do if I had only six months left to live? I'd type faster. - Isaac Asimov . An incinerator is a writer's best friend. - Thornton Wilder . The covers of this book are too far apart. - Ambrose Pierce . The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid and stable business. - John Steinbeck . Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. - TS Eliot . If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research. - Wilson Mizner . My favorite poem is the one that starts out, 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something. - Groucho Marx . All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. - Oscar Wilde . The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with. - Marty Feldman . I am a drinker with writing problems. - Brendan Behan . Not being able to create is the closest thing to death. - Anyssa Kim , Read everything. Write even if you don't feel like it -- especially if you don't feel like it. Write what interests and moves you without regard to how it will be received. Don't be afraid to go to the dark places or toward what scares you as a writer. Put a little blood on the page -- a book should cost you something to write. Otherwise, you're better off watching The E! True Hollywood Story. - Libba Bray . An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. - Charles Horton Cooley . “A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.” -Cyril Connelly . “Do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.” - WC Sellar . “The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.” -Dennis Potter, dramatist . “A writer’s problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.” – Ernest Hemingway: The Problems of a Writer in War Time . "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 ~ . “If you wish to be a writer, write.” – Epictetus: Discourses II (110 A.D.) . "I write for the same reason I breathe; because if I didn't, I would die." - Isaac Asimov . I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine. --Spike Milligan . "Why do writers write? Because it isn't there." --Thomas Berger . "When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's works is all I can permit myself to contemplate." -- John Steinbeck . “There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.” William Makepeace Thackery . "A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns." ~ P L Travers ~ . Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. - Anon. . Got Quotes? Send them to me. I put up new ones all the time. |
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