Writing Quotes

Quotes About Writing From Million Quotes

 

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. - Harold Acton

 

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. - Anaïs Nin

 

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. - Ray Bradbury

 

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. - E.L. Doctorow

 

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. - Charles Peguy

 

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. - Sylvia Plath

 

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. - Richard Wright

 

I try to leave out the parts that people skip. - Elmore Leonard

 

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. - Toni Morrison

 

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. - Logan Pearsall Smith

 

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. - Norbet Platt

 

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. - Vita Sackville-West

 

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. - Sharon O'Brien

 

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. - James Michener

 

The time to begin 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. - Mark Twain

 

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. - William Wordsworth

 

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. - Vladimir Nabakov

 

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

 

Easy reading is damn hard writing. - Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. - Terri Guillemets

 

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. - Orson Scott Card

 

A metaphor is like a simile. - Author Unknown

 

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. - Mark Twain

 

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it. - Jules Renard

 

Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. - Author Unknown

 



 

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. - Karl Kraus

 

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. - Samuel McChord Crothers

 

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can. - Samuel Lover

 

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. - James Michener

 

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. - Peter De Vries

 

Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. - Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. - Mignon McLaughlin

 

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

 

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

 

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. - John K. Hutchens

 

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. - Author Unknown

 

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. - Hannah Arendt

 

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. - Ann Beattie

 

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. - John Cheever

 

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. - Henry Brooks Adams

 



 

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

 

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. - Francis Bacon

 

The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it. - William Gass

 

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

 

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

 

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. - Samuel Butler

 

Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains — God composes, why shouldn't we? - Terri Guillemets

 

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may. - Walter Savage Landor

 

Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
- Denise Levertov

 

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man. - Blaise Pascal

 

Every writer I know has trouble writing. - Joseph Heller

 

Writer's block is a disease for which there is no cure, only respite. - Terri Guillemets

 

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one. - Baltasar Gracián

 

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

 

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces. - Harold Ross

 



 

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so you can give that to people, then you are a writer. - Ernest Hemingway

 

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. - Sholem Asch

 

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish. - Augustus William Hare

 

An author plants the alphabet — and harvests flowers, nourishment, and weeds. - Terri Guillemets

 

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. - Lord Byron

 

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. - Anaïs Nin

 

I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. - Jack Smith

 

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words. - Norman Mailer

 

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts. - Juvenal, Satires

 

Writing is a struggle against silence. - Carlos Fuentes

 

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. - Jack London

 

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. - Elias Canetti

 

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories. - Paul Gallico

 

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper. - Isaac Bashevis Singer

 



 

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window. - Burton Rascoe

 

It's not a good idea to try to put your wife into a novel. Not your latest wife, anyway. - Norman Mailer

 

The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. - Agatha Christie

 

Every word born of an inner necessity — writing must never be anything else. - Etty Hillesum

 

A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head. - Ethel Wilson

 

Publication – is the auction of the Mind of Man. - Emily Dickinson

 

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. - Jorge Luis Borges

 

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. - Don Marquis

 

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters. - Miguel de Cervantes

 

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. - E.L. Doctorow

 

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. - Henry David Thoreau

 

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. - Arthur Polotnik

 

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff. - Adlai Stevenson, quoted in Ronald D. Fuchs, You Said a Mouthful

 

With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under ground. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 



 

Most editors are failed writers — but so are most writers. - T.S. Eliot

 

Human language may be polite and powerless in itself, uplifted with difficulty into expression by the high thoughts it utters, or it may in itself become so saturated with warm life and delicious association that every sentence shall palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables.... There may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter: there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence. - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

 

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told. - André Gide

 

Between the two windows stood the writing-table, covered with heaps of newspapers, stacks of letters, mountains of ledgers, bound in canvas or leather, and tipped with brass at the corners; a chaos for every eye and every hand but the master's. - Franz von Dingelstedt

 

Some authors write with a grave ink, of a dramatic pen dipped into their dark souls. - Terri Guillemets

 

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free. - Samuel Johnson

 

I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write. - Anton Chekhov

 

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident. - W. Somerset Maugham

 

They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works. - Robert Burton

 

The road to hell is paved with adverbs. - Stephen King

 

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin. - Karl Kraus

 

As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out. - Mark Twain

 

We write to remember our nows later. - Terri Guillemets

 

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. - Virginia Woolf

 

Caress your phrase tenderly: it will end by smiling at you. - Anatole France

 



 

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension. - Norman Mailer

 

An author, behind his words, is naked. - Terri Guillemets

 

My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma. - E.B. White

 

When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on. - Karl Kraus, translated from German by Harry Zohn

 

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. - Isaac Bashevis Singer

 

A well-disposed research librarian is a writer's best friend, as essential as ink. - Barbara Rogan, Suspicion

 

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all. - Lord Byron

 

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. - Theodore Dreiser

 

There is a zone to writing. It takes some effort, some hours of struggle to reach, but once you're there, the words flow as if from a spigot. Thoughts fill up the page. Your fingers function independently of your body and brain as you tap out the poetry. It's the groove that baseball hitters speak of. The hot hand that basketball players relish. It is that sweet moment in a race car when everything slows down despite the speedometer reading 175 miles per hour. Everything doable in life has a zone like this. Find it and get into it. - Joe Kita

 

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else. - Havelock Ellis

 

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason. They made no such demand upon those who wrote them. - Charles Caleb Colton

 

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. - Saul Bellow

 

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! - Henry David Thoreau

 

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible. - Washington Irving

 



 

As is invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary biographies, the little boy was a glutton for books.... For his first writing exercise he painstakingly reproduced: "Obey your sovereign, honor him and submit to his laws," and the compressed ball of his index finger thus remained ink-stained forever. Now the thirties are over and the forties have begun. - Vladimir Nabokov

 

It is impossible to discourage the real writers — they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write. - Sinclair Lewis

 

Being an author is being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. - Terri Guillemets

 

The author writes as a race-horse runs, for the sake of it. He feels like it, and kindles just because he enjoys burning. - The Living Way

 

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? - Friedrich Nietzsche

 

A good author dances on typewriter keys. - Terri Guillemets

 

It is indeed certain, that whoever attempts any common topick, will find unexpected coincidences of his thoughts with those of other writers; nor can the nicest judgment always distinguish accidental similitude from artful imitation. - Samuel Johnson

 

Writing is both mask and unveiling. - E.B. White

 

So Friar Jerome began his Book.
From break of dawn till curfew-chime
He bent above the lengthening page,
Like some rapt poet o'er his rhyme.
- T.B. Aldrich

 

A notepad by the bedside accounts for half the earnings of my livelihood. If it weren't for bedtime, half my novels would still be stuck at dock. - Terri Guillemets

 

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink. - T.S. Eliot

 

Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs. - Jerome Stern

 

Let’s hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks. - Peter S. Prescott

 

The author, as a rule, dearly loves every line of his work, from the first stroke down to the dotlet on the i, and certainly has a right to it. - Gustav Boehm

 

It’s not plagiarism — I’m recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do. - Uniek Swain

 



 

I really would like to stop working forever—never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now—and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends.... Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence. - Allen Ginsberg

 

If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. - Henry Rollins

 

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

 

Kafka became a model for me, a continuing inspiration. Not only did he exhibit an irrepressible originality—who else would think of things like this!—he seemed to say that only in one's most personal language can the crucial tales of a writer be told. Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel a particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share. - Anne Rice

 

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. - Gustave Flaubert

 

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it — I might be writing in my dreams. - Terri Guillemets

 

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook

 

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen. - Leo Tolstoy

 

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. - Samuel Johnson

 

Authors are magpies, echoing each other's words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters. - Bergen Evans

 

I lied about my weight on my poetic license. - Terri Guillemets

 

What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach. - Logan Pearsall Smith

 

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published. - Russell Lynes

 

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. - Jean Luc Godard

 

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. - James Norman Hall

 



 

Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word. - Gail Hamilton

 

Words were the only net to catch a mood, the only sure weapon against oblivion. - Jan Struther

 

It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.) - Christopher Hitchens

 

Love letters and poems aren't the least bit difficult to write, if you write directly from your heart into the ink and don't channel through your brain first. - Terri Guillemets

 

Some books come to you.... They are bonuses, gifts. You do not have to kill some little part of your flesh to dredge them up. This is a fatal shade mystical, but it is almost as if you are serving as agent for a book which wants to get itself written. So the author never knows what to think of such books when he is done. His real fondness — since writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing — is more for those books he delivered out of his own flesh, torn and deadened by the process, but able at least to use all art and craft, all accumulated lore. - Norman Mailer

 

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? - Joan Didion

 

I'm a singer-songwriter.... If I'm not doing it, I'm like a flower without water. When I'm doing it, I'm a sunflower six feet tall.... Writing songs is like free therapy. Instead of paying a guy 125 bucks an hour to pull stuff out of me, I pull it out of myself and put it on paper. And then I own it, but it doesn't own me. - Rob from Tucson

 

Journal: fitting your heart and soul into ruled lines. - Terri Guillemets

 

Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially. - A. Bronson Alcott

 

The artist's only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies. - William Faulkner

 

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. - Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

 

The reason why many people are so fond of using superlatives, is, they are so positive that the poor positive is not half positive enough for them. - Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

 

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

A great writer creates his precursors. - Jorge Luis Borges

 

The only cure for writer's block is insomnia. - Terri Guillemets

 



 

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

 

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. - Jules Renard

 

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. - Ray Bradbury

 

Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear — and devils, too. - Terri Guillemets

 

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. - Franklin P. Adams

 

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world. - G.K. Chesterton

 

I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end with a skyscraper made of wood. - Norman Mailer

 

It is possible to regard Norman Mailer as one of the prices we pay for widespread literacy. - Richard Gilman

 

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. - André Gide, Journals

 

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, A Kind of Magic

 

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax. - Alfred Kazin

 

A typical Mailer bon mot: an impeccable thought and an elegant formulation, preceded by seven words of needless mush. - Jim Lewis

 

Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals. - Proust

 

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. - Samuel Johnson

 

I am tempted to call this section Economics, for it concerns the loss and gain (economically, psychically, physically) of living as a writer. Let's settle, however, for a term that may be closer to the everyday reality: Lit Biz. Spend your working life as a writer and depend on it—your income, your spirit, and your liver are all on close terms with Lit Biz. - Norman Mailer

 



 

Why write: It's the only place in my head that's quiet enough to breathe and loud enough to break things.... Waking up at 2am to vomit up poetry and then going back to sleep.... A writer is the closest thing to a human thunderstorm. - Author Unknown

 

The universe will do the writing for you, if you just listen close enough. - Terri Guillemets

 

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. - William Styron

 

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft. - Jessamyn West

 

I write with great difficulty.... Don't like to write, but like having written. Hate the effort of driving pen from line to line, work only three hours a day, but work every day. - Frank Norris

 

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. - George Orwell

 

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

 

He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink. - John Ray

 

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

 

The idea could even be advanced that style comes to young authors about the time they recognize that life is out there ready to kill them, kill them quickly or slowly, but something out there is not fooling. It would explain why authors who were ill in their childhood almost always arrive early in their career as developed stylists: Proust, Capote, and Alberto Moravia give three examples. Gide offers another. This notion would certainly account for the early and complete development of Hemingway's style. He had the unmistakable sensation of being wounded so near to death that he felt his soul slide out of him, then slip back. The average young author is not that ill in childhood or that harshly used by early life. - Norman Mailer

 

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence. - Fay Weldon

 

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

 

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such. - Samuel Butler

 

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. - Robert Benchley

 

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

 



 

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof [$h¡t] detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. - Ernest Hemingway

 

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. - Samuel Johnson

 

The best style is the style you don't notice. - Somerset Maugham

 

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 want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. - John Updike

 

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM. - Tiffany Madison

 

When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person. - Emily Dickinson

 

Authorship is exhibitionism, and readers a species of voyeur. - Terri Guillemets

 

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible. - Leo Tolstoy

 

The majority of writers ought to translate themselves; there are but few thoughts that are born translated, that is, clothed with the power best fitted alike to express and transmit them. What we have in the first instance written for ourselves, should be written a second time for others. - Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847), Literature. First Section: Literature in General. Chapter III.—Literary Precepts. II. Literary Precepts— 3. Literary Precepts and Miscellaneous Observations—Rage for Reading, Outlines of Philosophy and Literature, edited by ‎Jean Frédéric Astié

 

Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice. - Norman Mailer

 

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

I would always be that same maddening, monstrous mixture of pedantry, egoism, politeness, selfishness, kindliness, sneakiness, larkiness, sociability, loneliness, ambition, ordered calm and hidden intensity. I would cover my life with words. I would spray the whole bloody world with words. - Stephen Fry

 

Don't expect the typewriter to ever completely disappear... - Hal Fair

 

A catless writer is almost inconceivable; even Ernest Hemingway, manly follower of the hunting trophy and the bullfight, lived waist-deep in cats. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys. - Barbara Holland

 



 

As a playwright, Williams had the minor defects of his major virtues. He sometimes ran a purple ribbon through his typewriter and gushed where he should have dammed. - T.E. Kalem

 

Children... what they are in the world for I don't know, for they are of no practical value as far as I can see. If I could beget a typewriter — but no, our fertile days are over. - Mark Twain

 

The book's idea or theme or meaning has been stirring about in your consciousness for months and probably years. When the idea first hits you you feel enormously stimulated and heightened. Then you wish you could get away from it, but now nothing but death can separate you from it. It's no use.... Now everything else in your life takes second place or fades out of your consciousness altogether. Clothes are unimportant, letters go unanswered for days or even weeks, parties you regard with a lackluster eye, travel is a lure to be avoided like death, for it is ruin to the sustained rhythm of your work day. Teeth go unfilled, bodily ills run unchecked, your idea of bliss is to wake up on Monday morning knowing that you haven't a single engagement for the entire week. You are cradled in a white paper cocoon tied up with typewriter ribbon. Awake and asleep the novel is with you, haunting you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of your story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting. - Edna Ferber

 

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true. - Robert Wilensky

 

I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of William Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon. - Bill Hoest

 

I heard that if you locked William Shakespeare in a room with a typewriter for long enough he'd eventually write all the songs by the Monkees. - Author Unknown

 

How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? - Woody Allen

 

Sometimes when I look at a thing I've written I get the feeling that I must have gone out of the room and left the typewriter running. - Gene Fowler

 

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane. - Graham Greene

 

The biggest obstacle to professional writing today is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon. Any school that can teach me how to do this can triple my earning capacity overnight (making it three dollars). Anybody can write, but it takes a man with snake-charmer's blood to change a ribbon. - Robert Benchley

 

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. - Dylan Thomas

 

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. - Isaac Asimov

 

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought. - Mignon McLaughlin

 

I've had secrets come out of my typewriter in invisible ink. - Terri Guillemets

 

They'll find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys. - Terri Guillemets