see also Words

• Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.--Alan Wilson Watts

• All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.--Isak Dinesen

• All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.--Robert Louis Stevenson (Reflections and Remarks on Human Life)

• As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest, or new because experience is new. . . . But, as a black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.--June Jordan

• As cows need milking and sweet peas need picking, so writers must continually exercise their mental muscles by a daily stint.--Joan Aiken

• At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then--and only then--it is handed to you.--Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

• At its heartmeat core, writing is about exploring the questions of your heart on the assumption that what intrigues you, what inflames or amuses or ennobles you, will have the same effect on someone else. It's about taking chances, and taking risks, and pushing yourself to be honest in the issues that present themselves.--J. Michael Straczynski (email 9/1/2000)

• Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.-—Neil Gaiman

• Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
  The pen is mightier than the sword.--Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Baron Lytton (Richelieu)

• Could we with ink the ocean fill,
  And were the skies of parchment made,
  Were every stalk on earth a quill,
  And every man a scribe by trade,
  To write the love of God above,
  Would drain the oceans dry.
  Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
  Though stretched from sky to sky.--F. M. Lehman ("The Love of God" [hymn])

• The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter--'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.--Mark Twain ("The Art of Composition" in Life as I Find It ed. by Neider)

• The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.--Robert Louis Stevenson

• Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers "Please will you do the job for me."--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

• Don't write merely to be understood. Write so that you cannot possibly be misunderstood.--Robert Louis Stevenson

• The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.--Dorothy L. Sayers

• Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.--Flannery O'Connor

• Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.--Ray Bradbury

• The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image like a slide or closer still a freeze frame showing characters in a simple situation....--Mavis Gallant

• First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII--and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.--Douglas Adams

• "Fool!" said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."--Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella)

• For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.--Ernest Hemingway (interview with George Plimpton in Writers at Work: Second Series)

• For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.--Matthew Arnold

• For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.-—Catherine Drinker Bowen

• A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.--G. K. Chesterton (Heretics)

• 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 (The Untarnished Gold, the Immutable Treasure)

• Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.--Larry L. King (None but a Blockhead: On Being a Writer)

• Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.--Edward Albee

• Hard writing makes easy reading.--Wallace Stegner (Crossing To Safety)

• I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.--Sandra Cisneros

• 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 more perfect and more lasting than the life experience from which it came?--Lawrence Clark Powell (You, John Milton)

• I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.--Doris Lessing

• I have always wanted to write in such a way that will make people think, "Why, I've always thought that but never found the words for it."--Pamela Hansford Johnson (in The New York Times 1981)

• I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.--P. G. Wodehouse

• I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.--Brenda Ueland

• I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a story-teller.--Erskine Caldwell (The Atlantic Monthly, July 1959)

• I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.--Lydia M. Child

• If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.--Lillian Hellman

• If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.--Anais Nin ("The New Woman" The White Blackbird)

• If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital. If you don't feel like you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it? If you don't have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you are not trying to tell enough.--John Irving

• If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.--Mickey Spillane

• It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.--E. B. White (Charlotte's Web)

• It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs.--Stanislaw Ulam

• 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

• Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.--John Adams

• 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

• Listening is essential in writing and it takes a lot of practice. It's not just listening with the ear, but it's that inner sort of listening. It's like listening to yourself think when you're driving long distances through the night, or listening to yourself play an instrument.--Sam Shepard

• Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.--Katherine Mansfield

• Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up on rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.--Meg Chittenden

• Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.--John Updike

• The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.--Martin Luther

• No one will pay you just to write. They'll pay you to communicate well, synthesize info, tell a good story.--Alexis Grant (on Twitter 1/2/2011)

• No writing is good that does not tend to better mankind in some way or other.--Alexander Pope (in Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, of Books and Men Collected from the Conversation of Mr. Pope, and Other Eminent Persons of His Time by Spence)

• Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.--Lillian Hellman

• Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.--Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

• Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.--John Sheffield (Essay on Poetry)

• Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much ... of my writing is verbal painting.--Elizabeth Bowen (in Elizabeth Bowen by Glendinning)

• Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. -William Strunk, Jr.

• Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth... But amusing? Never.--Edna Ferber

• The only difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is discipline.--Ayelet Waldman

• ...the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.--Brenda Ueland

• The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.--Marty Feldman

• Plot springs from character... I've always sort of believed that these people inside of me--these characters--know who they are and what they're about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don't type.--Anne Lamott

• Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.--Kahlil Gibran

• The process of writing, any form of creativity, is a power intensifying life.--Rita Mae Brown (Starting From Scratch)

• The secret of good writing is telling the truth.--Gordon Lish (Dick Cavett television interview, Aug. 25, 1991)

• 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

• The spoken discourse may roll on strongly as the great tidal wave; but, like the wave, it dies at last feebly on the sands. It is heard by few, remembered by still fewer, and fades away, like an echo in the mountains, leaving no token of power. It is the written human speech, that gave power and permanence to human thought.--Albert Pike

• Television has raised writing to a new low.--Samuel Goldwyn

• Then he said to Scheherazade: "Sister, for the sake of Allah, tell us a story that will help pass the night."--The Arabian Nights

• There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.--William Somerset Maugham

• This is the gift all writers seek--to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.--Lawrence Clark Powell (The Little Package)

• Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.--Albert Camus

• To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.--Lawrence Clark Powell (A Southwestern Century)

• To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.--Truman Capote

• The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.--Zadie Smith

• The waste basket is the writer's best friend.--Isaac Singer

• What gets written has always depended on who is doing the writing. And what they see. Men have traditionally written history. They have seen what they wanted.--Amy Wilson

• When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.--Isaac Singer

• Write something that’s worth fighting over. Because that’s how you change things. That’s how you create art.--Jeff Goins

• Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow...--Lawrence Clark Powell (The Little Package)

• A writer expresses himself in words that have been used before because they give his meaning better than he can give it himself, or because they are beautiful and witty, or because he expects them to touch a chord of association in his reader, or because he wishes to show that he is learned and well read.--H. W. Fowler ("Quotation," Dictionary of Modern English Usage)

• A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.--Anonymous

• [A writer] must try to think clearly, to feel deeply, to write honestly. If he is fortunate he will make a living, but his work will never be anymore essentially clear and deep and honest than he himself is, and he will be judged finally not for how many copies his books have sold, but for what they have done to enrich the lives of their readers, now and in time to come.--Lawrence Clark Powell (Books in My Baggage)

• The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.--Simone de Beauvoir

• Writers tell lies for a living. But we try to layer in enough truth that you believe everything we tell you.--Christina York

• Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people--if only they'd stop writing.--Laura Miller (from a salon.com review of the movie Finding Forrester)

• Writing came easy--it would only get hard when I got better at it.--Garry Willis (Confessions of a Conservative)

• 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 the mirror which waits always before or behind.--Catherine Drinker Bowen

• Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself.--Katherine Anne Porter ("On Writing" The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter)

• 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 (Hide and Seek)

• Writing is a tool of transformation and can shine the light on the inside, dispelling darkness, taking us through external layers, bringing us closer to our souls.--Hillary Carlip

• Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.--Gene Fowler

• Writing is hard work and bad for the health.--E. B. White

• Writing is like gardening. Planting, watering, and weeding are not enough. You have to prune if you want growth.--Ron Brackin

• Writing is the art of second thought.--Rene J. Cappon (Associated Press Guide to News Writing)

• Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.--Jules Renard

• Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.--Gloria Steinem

• Writing isn’t magic, it’s work; earning a living as a writer means showing up at the typewriter every day, whether you feel like it or not.--Susan Wittig Albert (A Wilder Rose)

• Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand--a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods--or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.--Willa Cather (On the Art of Fiction)

• Writing's still the most difficult job I've ever had - but it's worth it.--John Grisham ("Boxers, Briefs and Books" in New York Times, September 5, 2010)

• You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure of writing.--John Updike (in Singular Encounters by Attallah)

• You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.--Neil Gaiman ("Where do you get your Ideas? An Essay")

• You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.--Sarah Orne Jewett (in Sarah Orne Jewett by Sliverthorne)