The Written Word

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say,
and so often one regrets having marred it.

—Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948

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, Half a Loaf, 1927

Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it;
scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon;
digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth;
never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.

—A. Bronson Alcott

For me, it is sufficient to have a corner by my hearth, a book and a friend,
and a nap undisturbed by creditors or grief.

—Fernandez de Andrada

The only cure for writer’s block is insomnia.

—Merit Antares

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

—Hannah Arendt

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

—Sholem Asch

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

—Isaac Asimov

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

—Francis Bacon

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good,
I have nothing much to do with the writing of them.
The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

—Joan Baez

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring,
is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order.

—Ann Beattie, Picturing Will, 1989

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing,
but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

—Robert Benchley

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens,
but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time . . . the wait is simply too long.

—Leonard Bernstein

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.
The writer experiences everything twice:
Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

—Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

—Ray Bradbury

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.
The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

—Ray Bradbury

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.
The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

—Ray Bradbury

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin.
The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities
and have them relate to other characters living with him.

—Mel Brooks

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

—Van Wyck Brooks

They lard their lean books with the fat of others’ works.

—Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing,
it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

—Samuel Butler

Books want to be born: I never make them.
They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

—Samuel Butler

If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.

—George Gordon, Lord Byron

One hates an author that’s all author.

—George Gordon, Lord Byron, Beppo

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

—George Gordon, Lord Byron

The process of writing has something infinite about it.
Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

—Elias Canetti

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.

—Truman Capote, McCall’s, November 1967

Writing has laws of perspective of light and shade just as painting does, or music.
If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them; then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

—Truman Capote

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

—Orson Scott Card

When you are describing,
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don’t state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.

—Lewis Carroll

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world,
with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.

—Miguel de Cervantes

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

—François-René de Chateaubriand, Le Génie du Christianisme, 1802

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle.

—John Cheever

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

—Anton Chekhov

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages
from the best writers in the world.

—G. K. Chesterton

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

—G. K. Chesterton

The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

—Agatha Christie

Little do such men know the toil, the pains,
The daily, nightly racking of the brains,
To range the thoughts, the matter to digest,
To cull fit phrases, and reject the rest.

—Charles Churchill

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement;
then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant.
The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude,
you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.

—Winston Churchill

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.

—Colette, Casual Chance, 1964

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason.
They made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

—Charles Caleb Colton

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

—Cyril Connolly

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them,
to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

—Hart Crane

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet.
So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

—Samuel McChord Crothers, Every Man’s Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else, 1920

I did what most writers do when something happens that’s overwhelming, fascinating, moving, all of that.
I didn’t know what else to do about it except write about it.

—Patti Davis

I keep little notepads all over the place to write down ideas as soon as they strike,
but the ones that fill up the quickest are always the ones at my nightstand.

—Emily Logan Decens

Writing is a form of personal freedom.
It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.
In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture,
but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

—Don Delillo

Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong.

—Jeb Dickerson

Publication is the auction of the mind of man.

—Emily Dickinson

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.

—Joan Didion

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

—Walt Disney

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

—E. L. Doctorow

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves.
Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

—E. L. Doctorow

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

—E. L. Doctorow

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night:
You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

—E. L. Doctorow

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.
Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

—Theodore Dreiser, 1900

I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing.
The first, of course, is ransom notes.

—Philip Dusenberr

Most editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.

—T. S. Eliot

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote,
and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

—Havelock Ellis

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past
where time hovers ghostlike.

—Ralph Ellison

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite
And builds a road into Chaos and old Night,
And is followed by those who hear him
With something of wild, creative delight.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The desire to write grows with writing.

—Desiderius Erasmus

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, as quoted by M. Cowley, Writers at Work, 1958

Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing,
for life itself is a writer’s lover until death . . .
fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.

—Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic, 1963

The reason one writes isn’t the fact he wants to say something.
He writes because he has something to say.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

An author in his book must be like God in the universe,present everywhere and visible nowhere.

—Gustave Flaubert

Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn’t we?

—Audra Foveo-Alba

Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

—Gene Fowler

Writing is a struggle against silence.

—Carlos Fuentes

Writing only leads to more writing.

—Sidonie Gabrielle

Lists are the butterfly nets that catch my fleeting thoughts.

—Betsy Cañas Garmon

A notepad by the bedside accounts for half the earnings of my livelihood.
If it weren’t for bedtime, half my novels would still be stuck at dock.

—Ever Garrison

The expression “to write something down” suggests a descent of thought
to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

—William Gass, Habitations of the Word, October 1984

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

—André Gide, 1894

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end . . . but not necessarily in that order.

—Jean Luc Godard

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Writing is making sense of life.
You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.

—Nadine Gordimer

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.

—Baltasar Gracián

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, the melancholia, the panic fear,
which is inherent in a human condition.

—Graham Greene

That’s what happens with writing. Ingredients bubble and cook. Material becomes substance.

—Alex Haley

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life.

—James Norman Hall

Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property;
whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word.

—Gail Hamilton

Language must resound with all the harmonies of music.
The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing
and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness.

—Knut Hamsun

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook:
His tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts;
and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish.

—Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers, 1827

The reason why many people are so fond of using superlatives, is, they are so positive
that the poor positive is not half positive enough for them.

—Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers, 1827

Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.

—Graycie Harmon

Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear—and devils, too.

—Graycie Harmon

Writers are just people who have a whole lot on the inside that they need to get to the outside,
with pen and paper as their preferred method of transport.
Same with dancers, artists, and singers—all the same urges with differing transportation.

—Graycie Harmon

I even shower with my pen, in case any ideas drip out of the waterhead.

—Graycie Harmon

Love letters and poems aren’t the least bit difficult to write,
if you write directly from your heart into the ink and don’t channel through your brain first.

—Graycie Harmon

Words—so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary,
how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other;
but when books are opened, you discover you have wings.

—Helen Hayes

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

—Joseph Heller

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

—Lillian Hellman

Write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

—Ernest Hemingway

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.
This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.

—Ernest Hemingway, Paris Review, Spring 1958

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows.
The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

—Ernest Hemingway

Every word born of an inner necessity—writing must never be anything else.

—Etty Hillesum, as quoted by Karol Jackowski, Ten Fun Things to Do Before You Die

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

—John K. Hutchens, New York Herald Tribune, September 10, 1961

Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe,
shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.

—John Jakes

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

—Samuel Johnson

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine,
strike it out.

—Samuel Johnson, Recalling the Advice of a College Tutor, 1791

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.

—Samuel Johnson

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.

—Samuel Johnson

Making words slant across the page was like making rain. Flowers grew in ink.
Hurricanes and revolutions were stirred up by the sound of pen scratching paper.

—Erica Jong

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.

—Juvenal, Satires

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

—Franz Kafka

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

—Franz Kafka

If your life has become dull and gray, try reading a great book.
Its characters will awaken fresh dreams and buried desires in you, and shine new light on your own life.

—Kajama(Thursday, April 24, 2003)

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself;
the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.

—Alfred Kazin, Think, February 1963

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others’ minds.

—Alfred Kazin

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

—John Keats

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

—Karl Kraus

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

—Karl Kraus

I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts,
spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness . . . and that can make me laugh.
When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be
in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little.

—Anne Lamott

You don’t have to see where you’re going,
you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way.
You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.
This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.

—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.
When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth,
you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader.
He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted,
and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

—Anne Lamott

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation.
They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: They feed the soul.
When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths,
and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored.

—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words,
who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.

—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

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

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.
What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper
unfold world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.
Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave.
They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.

—Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversation: Diogenes and Plato

What is reading but silent conversation?

—Walter Savage Landor

If I’m trying to sleep, the ideas won’t stop. If I’m trying to write, there appears a barren nothingness.

—Carrie Latet

Authorship is exhibitionism, and readers a species of voyeur.

—Carrie Latet

Writing is a product of silence.

—Carrie Latet

Without a pen I feel naked, but it’s writing that is my exhibitionism.

—Carrie Latet

I am a man, and alive . . . For this reason I am a novelist.
And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher,
and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.

—D. H. Lawrence, All Things Are Possible, 1938

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.

—Elmore Leonard

Let me walk through the fields of paper
touching with my wand
dry stems and stunted
butterflies . . . .

—Denise Levertov, A Walk through the Notebooks

It is impossible to discourage the real writers;
they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.

—Sinclair Lewis

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

Books to the ceiling. Books to the sky.
My pile of books are a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.

—Arnold Lobel

When once the itch of literature comes over a man,
nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.
But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.

—Samuel Lover, Handy Andy, 1842

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.

—Russell Lynes

I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

—Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947

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

I never think at all when I write; nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.

—Don Marquis, Archy’s Life of Mehitabel, 1933

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

—Groucho Marx

The best style is the style you don’t notice.

—Somerset Maugham

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

—W. Somerset Maugham, Summing Up, 1938

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners’ names.
I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.

—Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

—Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night,
and that’s a writer sitting down to write.

—Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.

—James Michener

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

—James Michener

A good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit,
embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

—John Milton

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

—Toni Morrison

I made a list of the things I wanted to do. There were only two things without which I couldn’t live:
Mother my children and write books.

—Toni Morrison

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there,
written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

—Vladimir Nabakov

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education;
dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?

—Friedrich Nietzsche

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

—Anaïs Nin

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning.
I wanted to know what I was going to say.

—Sharon O’Brien

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

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

—George Orwell

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon
whom one can neither resist nor understand.

—George Orwell, Why I Write, 1947

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don’t remove it—I might be writing in my dreams.

—Danzae Pace

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most.
The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading;
but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

—Theodore Parker

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted,
because we expected to see an author and find a man.

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts.
The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

—Charles Peguy

I write down everything I want to remember.
That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down,
I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on.

—Beryl Pfizer

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it,
and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

—Sylvia Plath

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought;
this, in turn, makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.

—Norbet Platt

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you.
And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

—Arthur Polotnik

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

—Enrique Jardiel Poncela

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

—Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.

—Ezra Pound

Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow . . .

—Lawrence Clark Powell

The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S’s:
the power to see, to sense, and to say.
That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language
what he observes and reacts to.

—Lawrence Clark Powell

What makes a book great, a so-called classic, is its quality of always being modern,
of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.

—Lawrence Clark Powell

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual,
a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

—Lawrence Clark Powell

No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library . . .
When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.

—Lawrence Clark Powell

Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books.
Reading them, however, has not changed; it is the same as it has always been,
since Callimachus administered the great library in Alexandrea.

—Lawrence Clark Powell

I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad.
I ask of it a single question: From how deep and true an impulse did it spring?
Was it written merely to shock? Only to make money? Or was it written to create something?

—Lawrence Clark Powell

A book is one of the most patient of all man’s inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book.
It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye.

—Lawrence Clark Powell

Books, themselves, need no defense.
Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

—Lawrence Clark Powell

Let’s hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors,
for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery
two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks.

—Peter S. Prescott

What most of us want is to be heard, to communicate.

—Dory Previn

Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals.

—Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working
when he’s staring out of the window.

—Burton Rascoe

He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish,
hide himself for the most part in his own ink.

—John Ray

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air.
All I must do is find it, and copy it.

—Jules Renard, Journal, February 1895

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.

—Jules Renard, Journal, February 1895

Find out the reason that commands you to write;
see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart;
confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

I lived to write, and wrote to live.

—Samuel Rogers

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories,
and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper
and then went back and filled in the spaces.

—Harold Ross

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.
How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?
For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.
That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

—Vita Sackville-West

Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.

—William Safire, Great Rules of Writing

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

—Rod Serling

The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

—Dr. Seuss

The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.

—Isaac Bashevis Singer

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory,
that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

—Isaac Bashevis Singer

I’d rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase
from another writer.

—Jack Smith

What things there are to write, if one could only write them!
My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations
hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings.
But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.

—Logan Pearsall Smith

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

—Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts, 1931

There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down . . . and open a vein.

—Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading.
Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

—Susan Sontag

The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish.
Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish.

—Terry Southern

I do not like to write; I like to have written.

—Gloria Steinem

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.

—Adlai Stevenson, as quoted in You Said a Mouthful

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

Whether or not you write well, write bravely.

—Bill Stout

Like everyone else, I am going to die.
But the words—the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them.
It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.

—J. Michael Straczynski

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

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis,
and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

—William Styron, Writers at Work, 1958

It’s not plagiarism—I’m recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do.

—Uniek Swain

I will write from my heart . . . and aside from the sheer pleasure of doing it,
if people happen to garner inspiration from it, or incentive, or find a new way to love, it would be wonderful.

—Patrick Swayze

Literature for me isn’t a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.

—Antonio Tabucchi

There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know
till he takes up the pen and writes.

—William Makepeace Thackeray

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare.
For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought;
as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors,
or the heavens without their azure.

—Henry David Thoreau

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

—Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 19, 1851

Don’t get it right, just get it written.

—James Thurber

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s own flesh in the inkpot,
each time one dips one’s pen.

—Leo Tolstoy

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation,
tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

—Leo Tolstoy

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction.
By that time, you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.

—Mark Twain

As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out.

—Mark Twain,Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894

The difference between the right word and the almost right word
is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

—Mark Twain

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

—Mark Twain

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very.”
Your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

—Mark Twain

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.

—John Updike

I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.

—Peter de Vries

Pen names are masks that allow us to unmask ourselves.

—C. Astrid Weber

The coroner will find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys.

—C. Astrid Weber

Novelists . . . fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly
through the chaos of his own existence.

—Fay Weldon

There is no royal path to good writing;
and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens,
various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.

—Jessamyn West, Saturday Review, September 21, 1957

Keep a diary and one day it’ll keep you.

—Mae West

Be obscure clearly.

—E. B. White

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

—E. B. White

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

—Oscar Wilde

A writer’s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.

—Ethel Wilson

Even as a kid, my memories are of books taking me out of myself.

—Oprah Winfrey

Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies.

—Emme Woodhull-Bäche

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

Writer’s block is a disease for which there is no cure, only respite.

—Laurie Wordholt

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

—William Wordsworth

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo;
and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly,
I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create
a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.

—Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

Writing eases my suffering . . . writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.

—Gao Xingjian

Writing is thinking on paper.

—William Zinsser

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.

—Author Unknown

Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

—Author Unknown

Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head.

—Author Unknown, from the movie Finding Forrester

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you
because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.

—Name Unknown, English Professor, Ohio University