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Some Favorite Writing Quotes...

Look into thought and say what dost thou see
Dive, be not fearful how dark the waves flow
Sink through the surge and bring pearls up to me
Deeper aye deeper, the fairest lie low

- Charlotte Brontë

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
- Ben Franklin

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
- Toni Morrison

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
- Anton Chekhov

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
- Erica Jong

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
- Mark Twain

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
- Erma Bombeck

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.

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
- Enrique Jardiel Poncela

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof crap detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
- Ernest Hemingway

In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself; to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratifications, is a curious anticlimax.
- Alfred Kazin

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
- Franz Kafka

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, Casual Chance

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of 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.
- Winston Churchill

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.
- Hart Crane

When humor goes, there goes civilization.
- Erma Bombeck

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

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.
- Van Wyck Brooks

There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes.
- William Makepeace Thackeray

"I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story."
- Isak Dinesen

"A novelist must preserve a child-like belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence."
- W. Somerset Maugham

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
— Leo Rosten

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

Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it that makes a difference.
— Nolan Bushnell

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
- Mark Twain

There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It's a kind of trick of the mind and he is born with it.
- Morley Callaghan

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
- Samuel Johnson

Never confuse movement with action.
- Ernest Hemingway

You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining . . . researching . . . talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
- E. L. Doctorow

The wastepaper basket is the writer’s best friend.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.
- Flannery O’Connor

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.
- Isaac Asimov

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
- John Ruskin

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
- Leo Rosten

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
- Oscar Wilde

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
- W. Somerset Maugham

Writers have to simultaneously believe the following two things:

  1. The story I am now working on is the greatest work of genius ever written in English.
  2. The story I am now working on is worthless drivel.
    . . . . Of course, believing two contradictory facts at the same time is sometimes referred to as madness---but that, too, can be an asset to a writer.
- Orson Scott Card

"Writing is the most disciplined form of thinking. It allows us to be precise, to stand back and examine what we have thought, to see what our words really mean, to see if they stand up to our critical eye, to see if they make sense and can be understood by others."
- Donald Murray

"When I don't write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color."
- Anais Nin

"Better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
- Abraham Lincoln

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
- Thomas Mann, novelist, Nobel laureate (1875-1955)

 

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