Favorite Quotes on Writing:Writers’ Quotes (from AOL listing)
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My
opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller
that could have been prevented by a good teacher. - Flannery O'connor
The trouble with the publishing business is that too many people who have
half a mind to write a book do so. - William Targ
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. - T.S. Eliot
I have nothing to say and I'm saying it and that is poetry. - John Cage Jr.
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open
a vein. - Red (Walter Wellesley) Smith
If you ask someone, 'Can you play the violin?' and he says, 'I don't know,
I've not tried, perhaps I can,' you laugh at him. Whereas about writing,
people always say: 'I don't know, I have not tried,' as though one had only
to try and one would become a writer. - Leo Tolstoy
I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word mayonnaise. -
Richard Brautigan
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. - Peter DeVries
All you need is a room without any particular interruptions. - John DosPassos
The secret of all good writing is sound judgement. - Horace
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing. - Sylvia Plath
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable
business. - John Steinbeck
It's not a writer's business to hold opinions. - William Butler Yeats
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what
they are. - Somerset Maugham
Every novel should have a beginning, a muddle, and an end. - Peter De Vries
My speed depends on the state of my bank account. - Mickey Spillane
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing. - Kingsley
Amis
Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities.
The other, unfortunately, is talent. - Ernest Hemingway
Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers. - Aldous Huxley
There are two literary maladies-writer's cramp and swelled head. The worst
of writer's cramp is that it is never cured; the worst of swelled head is
that it never kills. - Coulson Kernahan
Every writer creates his own precursors. - Jorge Luis Borges
A screenwriter is a man who is being tortured to confess and has nothing to
confess. - Christopher Isherwood
Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men and I will find an
excuse in them to hang him. - Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis, duc deRichelieu
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
My stories written when sober are stupid. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writers aren't exactly people...They're a whole lot of people trying to be
one person. - Anon.
In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are
important, in England no writer is important and in Australia you have to
explain what a writer is. - Geoffrey Cotterell
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and
therefore are most economical in its use. - Mark Twain
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in
the daytime or when both were sober. - James Thurber
I write at high speed because boredom is bad for my health. - Noel Coward
You climb a long ladder until you can see over the roof, or over the clouds.
You are writing a book. - Annie Dillard
The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little
frocks; but they are not the kind that any fool can run up in half an hour
with a machine. - Dorothy Sayers
The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble.
It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them. - Raymond Chandler
It never occurred to me that what I wrote was something to define. I am
governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by
gravity. - Marianne Moore
I write books to find out about things. - Rebecca West
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've
made sense of one small area. - Nadine Gordimer
One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the
goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of
language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
- Cynthia Ozick
A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as
sincerely from the author's soul. - Aldous Leonard Huxley