Writing Quotes

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation.

Tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice!

You stole my story and something's got to be done about it.

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

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

One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, "had made both sides see themselves as they are.

There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.

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

Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.

The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

And I write novels!" chimed in the other cop. "Though I haven't had any of them published yet, so I better warn you, I'm in a meeeean mood!

Slartibartfast's study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library.

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression?

To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again.

The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situation is itself an act of optimism

The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.

Resolution demands a sacrifice.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it shor

Whether it's something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday I must start out with an emotion, one that's close to me and that I can understand.

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.

If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.

For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room...

The writing begins when you've finished. Only then do you know what you're trying to say.

Writing is the act of finding out what I think.

I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you.

The time to being 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.

When the work is the best work, it's more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you just sort of take the stuff down.

I'm writing a book. I'm almost finished. I numbered the pages. Now all I have to do is fill them in.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945

If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will.

Perfect grammar--persistent, continuous, sustained--is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.

Artists strive for perfection. But what they often fail to see is that the beauty, the humanity, lies within the flaws.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.

Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.

But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.

You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler!

What you don't write is often more important than what you do

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.

...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

Always speak the truth - think before you speak - and write it down afterwards.

Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it sho