If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
~ Kingsley Amis
Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
~ Maya Angelou
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
~ Maya Angelou
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
~ Issac Asimov
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
~ Isaac Asimov
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
~ Richard Bach
I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
~Charles Baudelaire
When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
“His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
~ Hilaire Belloc
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
Nice writing isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to have smooth and pretty language. You have to surprise the reader frequently, you can’t just be nice all the time. Provoke the reader. Astonish the reader. Writing that has no surprises is as bland as oatmeal. Surprise the reader with the unexpected verb or adjective. Use one startling adjective per page.
~ Anne Bernays
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
~ Josh Billings
The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.
~ Ray Bradbury
You fail only if you stop writing.
~ Ray Bradbury
It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
~ Gerald Brenan
No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.
~ Robert Byrne
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as idleness.
~ Thomas Carlyle
Medicine is my lawful wife. Literature is my mistress.
~ Anton Chekhov
Literary people are forever judging the quality of the mind by the turn of expression.
~ Frank Moore Colby
Writing only leads to more writing.
~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
Writers are too self-centered to be lonely.
~ Richard Condon
One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
~ Michael Cunningham
The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in new way or to say a new thing an old way.
~ Richard Harding Davis
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
~ E. L. Doctorow
Nothing is new except arrangement.
~ Will Durant
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
If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.
~ Epictetus
The desire to write grows with writing.
~ Erasmus
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
~ William Faulkner
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
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
~ Robert Frost
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
~ Robert Frost
Writing is a struggle against silence.
~ Carlos Fuentes
Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.
~ John Green
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 and fear which is inherent in the human situation.
~ Graham Greene
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterward.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
~ Ernest Hemingway
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 about water.
~ Ernest Hemingway
In order to write about life, first you must live it!
~ Ernest Hemingway
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
~ Ernest Hemingway
The first draft of anything is shit.
~ Ernest Hemingway
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
~ Ernest Hemingway
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
~ Hermann Hesse
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.
~ Christopher Hitchens
Originality is undetected plagiarism.
~ William Inge
The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
~ Samuel Johnson
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
~ Franz Kafka
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
~ Jack Kerouac
You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.
~ Tracy Kidder
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
~ Stephen King
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
~ Stephen King
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
~ Stephen King
I’ve experienced t he pain and joy of hte birth of babies and the birth of books and there’s nothing like it: when a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or composing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationshiip with those he loves, with the whole world.
~ Madeleine L’Engle, in A Circle of Quiet
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
You can make anything by writing.
~ C. S. Lewis
Though old the thought and oft exprest,
‘Tis his at last who says it best.
~ James Russell Lowell
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
~ W. Somerset Maugham
Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
~ W. Somerset Maugham
Writing is the supreme solace.
~ W. Somerset Maugham
Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.
~ George Moore
Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.
~ John Morley
Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: “The King is dead” and “Jesus wept.”
~ Bill Moyers
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.
~ Friedrich Neitzsche
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
~ Anaïs Nin
Good writing is like a windowpane.
~ George Orwell
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
~ George Orwell
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with 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
I hate writing, I love having written.
~ Dorothy Parker
The last thing that we discover in writing a book is to know what to put at the beginning.
~ Pascal
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
~ Sylvia Plath
Words spoken may fly away… The writing-brush leaves its mark.
~ Chinese Proverb
There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.
~ Jules Renard
You can fix anything but a blank page.
~ Nora Roberts
The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.
~ J. K. Rowling
Words are loaded pistols.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.
~ John Sheffield
The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.
~ Logan Smith
Originality is not saying something new, originality is taking the mundane and remaking it afresh.
~ Kevin Stilley
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
~ Logan Pearsall Smith
There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
~ Red Smith
Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
~ William Styron
Word has somehow got around that the split infinitive is always wrong. That is a piece with the outworn notion that it is always wrong to strike a lady.
~ James Thurber
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
~ Lionel Trilling
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
~ Mark Twain
Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him.
~ Mark Twain
As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
~ Mark Twain
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
~ Voltaire
I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.
~ Alice Walker
Be obscure clearly.
~ E. B. White
Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
~ E. B. White
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
~ Elie Wiesel
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
~ Tennessee Williams
Obscurity in writing is commonly an argument of darkness in the mind. The greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness.
~ John Wilkins
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
~ Virginia Woolf
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
~ Virgina Woolf
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
~ William Wordsworth
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