Quotes on Writing

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." Benjamin Franklin

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." Robert Frost

"Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter." Jessamyn West

"Writing is its own reward." Henry Miller

"Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'" James Thurber

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window." William Faulkner

"The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear." E.B. White

"As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand." Ernest Hemingway

"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends." Friedrich Nietzsche

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children." Madeleine L'Engle

"When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time. " Lady Gaga

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." Stephen King

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within." Gustave Flaubert

"Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being." A. A. Milne

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect." Anaïs Nin

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative." Elmore Leonard

"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good." William Faulkner

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." Mark Twain

"Half my life is an act of revision." John Irving

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish." Hermann Hesse

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

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." Douglas Adams

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple." Jack Kerouac

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do." Thomas Jefferson

"I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged." Erica Jong

"A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God." Sidney Sheldon

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

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme." Herman Melville

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

"Writers live twice." Natalie Goldberg

"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing." Norman Mailer

"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

"A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time--proof that humans can work magic." Carl Sagan

"The most essential gift of a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector," Hemingway

"Plot is a Verb," Ansen Dibble

"If the summary of your own story turns out to be one you haven't already seen fifty times, so much the better. If not, don't worry: all the love stories haven't yet been written, nor anything close," Ansen Dibble

"Beginning a character's dialogue by letting him name the other person is the obvious way of telling the reader to whom he is speaking," Jean Saunders

"Rather, very, little, pretty - these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words...we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is rather an important one and we are pretty sure to violate it now and again," William Strunk & EB White

"A good too many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a SAE big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor," Ring Lardner

"Get that first draft down on paper. If you are stuck in some section just put a page with 'here so-and-so finds out where the key was hidden,' or 'here there's a scene where they fall in love,' or ' I don't know exactly what happens here,' then plunge on. Get it all down. Finish the book." Dominick Dunne

"I have had a sign on my typewriter for 20 years, that says - 'don't think, do it!'," Ray Bradbury

"I'm a frustrated actress. I act all these characters. If I don't cry about them, if I don't laugh at their jokes, if I don't lose my temper and if I don't swear, it doesn't seem that I am writing them; someone else is. I act all these characters, I live these characters. And I never use four-letter words either, just all the 'damns' and 'blasts', and nor will I go into the dockyard atrocities of sex. I imply it and let the reader take it from there," Catherine Cookson

"Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait," Charles Reade

"Stay with what it is and it will give you everything that isn't. From this wooden table I am learning on, I can build a whole world of fiction," Natalie Goldberg

"Get on with it. There are people who 'talk book', and there are people who 'write book': talking writers, and writing writers," Arthur Hailey

"Asking a writer what he thinks about critics, is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs," Christopher Hampton

"The title of the novel is part of the text, the first part of it, in fact, that we encounter - and therefore has considerable power to attract and condition the reader's attention," David Lodge

"I have never written for more than half an hour in my life. Writing to me only occupies a teeny wee bit of my life. And to be truthful, I hate writing. I wouldn't like the idea of writing all day at all," James Herriot

"If a writer knows something, even if he doesn't write it, it is present in his work," Hemingway

"If you have a skeleton in your cupboard, take it out and dance with it." Carolyn Mackenzie

"If a publisher declines your manuscript, remember it is merely the decision of one fallible human being, try another." Stanley Unwin

"If you really want to achieve greatness, you have to keep challenging yourself. You have to keep going back into yourself," James Elroy

"What all of us must do is get an idea that excites US and then write the hell out of it. Write it as well as you know how. And if you hit a nerve, and it's true, then you have a chance," Sidney Sheldon

"As a writer, you're rejected so often that you have to develop a resilience. So when I'm down it rarely lasts...I search around until I find something to get excited about," Alex Hailey

"Do they keep throwing the book at Jeffrey Archer as an act of revenge for his lousy novels?" Keith Waterhouse

"You wrote too fast. You're scared. Slow down. You shouldn't write a short story in less than two months." Cecil Dawkins

"The beginning is the 'want', the middle the 'conflict' and the end is the 'resolution'." Danny Simon

"I don't have much time for a playwright that can't write a book, because I don't think they can. A play is a piece of cake to write, it you can write dialogue, and you can plot. They get much lauded, everyone from Tennesse Williams to Pinter and Stoppard. I'd like to see them write a novel. They couldn't in my opinion." Roald Dahl

"I've never had a short story published. So, in a way, I didn't really achieve my ambition. In that sense I'm still a failure." Joseph Wambaugh

"When in doubt, cut." Ford Maddox Ford

"Too much polishing weakens rather than improves a work." Pliny the Younger

"An even battle is more fun to watch." Ansen Dibell

"The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself." Patricia Highsmith

"Most authors would consider it undesirable to approach a publisher in a dirty incoherent condition. But that is, in effect, what they do when they submit a dirty and dilapidated manuscript." Stanley Unwin

"First, find out what the hero wants and then just follow him/her." Raymond Bradbury

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." Samuel Johnson

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." H G Wells

"It took me 15 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

"There will come a day, if you persist, when your pen will move nimbly and you will feel elated, and exclaim to yourself: Now I know that I can write," Arnold Bennett

"Jilly Cooper has been described as 'insecure and ludicrously sensitive': characteristics of any successful writer." Michael Joseph

"Writing is a dog's life, but the only one worth living," Gustave Flaubert

"If you write from the heart, you are writing at the very best of your ability," Bernie Ross

"I can't write a sex scene. In my first book there was one four-letter word, and my mother saw it and told me off about it. I wrote a sex scene and when Doubleday (publishers) saw it they just laughed at me. They said, 'You don't need it. You are a story-teller.'" Jeffrey Archer

"When I was ten, my dad bought me a second-hand typewriter and I typed out these little tales and stitched them in a folder with a hand-painted title. When I was twelve I submitted one - about a little horse, I think - to something called The Children's Mag and it was actually published. I have never stopped writing since." Barbara Taylor Bradford

"Write hard and clear about what hurts." Ernest Hemingway

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Don't allow yourself to get fussed over how to begin. Don't sit staring at a blank screen." Donna Levin

"Raising questions and then supplying plausible, yet unexpected answers, this is the job of the storyteller." David Gerrold

"Fiction fatigue - expect it, and don't let it ruin your story," Ansen Dibell

"I would never write about someone who is not at the end of his rope." Stanley Elkin

"Give the readers a book with people they care about and they will queue up to shake the author's hand." Norman Cousins

"An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke." F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Always remember your reader, or else you are talking to yourself." Nigel Watts