Writing Quotes

Writing Quote of the day

The name of a great writer is usually bigger than the title of his book. Both literally and figuratively.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

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.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

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

...Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer...called books 'the scholar's mistress'...the one who made no demands and always took him in...

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect.

When asked, How do you write? I invariably answer, One word at a time.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

It's the writing that teaches you.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

When you write a story you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story.

Never durst a poet touch a pen to writeUntil his ink was tempered with love's sighs.

A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.

It is the tale, not he who tells it.

Inspiration for what we produce comes from reading, observing the world of humans around us and also the animal kingdom

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.

Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

You rely too much on brain. The brain is the most overrated organ.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.

The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

Your manuscript is both good and original but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good.

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.

Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.

Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.

It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.

To be a writer, you must write. To be a published writer you must finish what you write and then get what you've written in front of the outside world.

It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.