Writing Quotes

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.

A story isn't about a moment in time, a story is about the moment in time.

Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don't have to give up anything to do it.

anyone who writes plays is unbelievably persistent, because there isn't a need in the world for plays. Somehow you internally have to feel a need to write a play.

I tend to not try and listen to a lot of other artists while I'm writing, because if I hear something that's brilliant.

Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

You have to write badly in order to write well.

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.

To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.

Instead of announcing what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?

If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.

Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.

Writing is a craft not an art.

It is a vast country, so that inspires you. It's also the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It's a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world.

I love working and writing new songs. But sometimes you need to wait, to have something in your mind, and then you can let yourself play music.

Music was my friend when I was a teenager, and I would inhabit and take comfort in lyrics. That's how I want to write.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

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

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

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

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.

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.

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

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

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301).

poems are small moments of enlightenment

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

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

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

A book is not completed till it's read.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.