Quotes About Writing        Back to Quotation Directory
Last modified: October 26, 2001

"I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a storyteller." - Erskine Caldwell

"All my major works have been written in prison . . . I would recommend prison not only to aspiring writers but to aspiring politicians, too." - Jawaharlal Nehru

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

"If we wait for the moment when everything is ready, we shall never begin." -- Ivan Turgenev

"To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition." – Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"The kind of thing only an accelerated culture like ours could have come up with: an instant classic." – Julian Dibbell, Amazon.com

"In this field, patience is as important as talent. There are no overnight stars. No short-term goals. You say to yourself, 'I'm the best,' then you spend the rest of your life proving it." - Nadja Salerno-Sonenberg, violinist

"Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all responsibility for what you do." - Erica Jong

"Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals." - John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

"You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I have never tried to earn an honest living." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"Dullness is the coming-of-age of seriousness." - Oscar Wilde, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - Cyril Connolly

"The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between the lightning and the lightning bug." - Mark Twain

"All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things." - Bobby Knight (from quotations compiled by John Hewitt)

"To write simply is as difficult as to be good." - W. Somerset Maugham

"What's another word for Thesaurus?" - Steven Wright, comedian

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." - Mark Twain (from quotations compiled by John Hewitt)

"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but is lightning that does the work." - Mark Twain

"I must tell you that the supply of words on the world market is plentiful, but the demand is falling." - Lech Walesa, President of Poland, speech to U.S. Congress, 1989

"Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work." - Clive Barker

"When I want to read a good book, I write one." - Benjamin Disraeli

"I've never met a writer whose wife wasn't beautiful." - Kurt Vonnegut, Preface to Welcome to the Monkey House

"Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others." - Marianne Moore

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.  To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic." - Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

"...there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers?" - Polybius, History, Book X, Section 36

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." - Cicero (from quotations compiled by John Hewitt)

"You become a good writer as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences." - Anatole France

"Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal." - Lionel Trilling

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

"Vision is the art of seeing things that are invisible." -- Jonathan Swift

"Wisdom consists in knowing what to do with what you know." - Anonymous

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector." - Ernest Hemingway

"The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are." - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

"If you copy from one author, it's plagiarism. If you copy from two, it's research." - Wilson Mizner

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

"The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use." - Chinua Achebe, Nigerian English-writing novelist (as quoted in The Oxford Companion to the English Language)

"Sincere words are not beautiful. Beautiful words are not sincere. He who knows is not learned. He who is learned does not know." - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 31, as translated by Victor H. Mair in Tao Te Ching, The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way, Bantam Books, New York, 1990.

"Language is a wonderful thing. It can be used to express our thoughts, to conceal our thoughts, or to replace thinking." - Anonymous

"The chief poet of the tribe shall sit next to the king at a banquet. Each shall be served the choicest cut of meat." – Ancient Irish law set down on parchment in the 7th century A.D.

"The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint-pot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man's fate and man's follies as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth. Rarely has a people paid the lavish compliment and taken the subtle revenge of turning its oppressor's speech into sorcery." – Ted Kalmen

"This is the sort of English up with which I will not put." - Sir Winston Churchill in response to a critic who publicly chastised Sir Winston's use of prepositions to end sentences.

"Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull." - Rod Serling, 1957. Contributed by Joan Wolff (joan@wolffdata.com). Source: Simpson's Contemporary Quotations: the most notable quotes since 1950. Compiled by James B. Simpson.)

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - Cyril Connolly (from quotations compiled by John Hewitt)

"As soon as any art is pursued with a view to money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work." - Samuel Butler

Your persistence is your belief in yourself." - Brian Tracy

"You have to believe in yourself, that's the secret. Even when I was in the orphanage, when I was roaming the street trying to find enough to eat, even then I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world. I had to feel the exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it, you go down to defeat." - Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977). Contributed by PhysLink: quotes@physlink.com)

"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." - Anonymous (Contributed by Simon Dew, sdew@acute.force9.co.uk or http://www.acute.force9.co.uk

"Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat." - Robert Graves, on writing novels to support his love of writing poetry

"Nor till the poets among us can be ‘literalists of/ the imagination'--above/ insolence and triviality and can present/ for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real/ toads in them,' shall we have/ it." - Marianne Moore ("Poetry")

"Action is eloquence." - William Shakespeare

"Over the past fifty years or so, scientists have allowed the conventions of expression available to them to becomne entirely too confining. The insistence on bland impersonality and the widespread indifference to anything like the display of a unique human author in scientific exposition, have not only transformed the reading of most scientific papers into an act of tedious drudgery, but have also deprived scientists of some powerful tools for enhancing their clarity in communicating matters of great complexity." - N. David Mermin, physicist (as quoted in the The Oxford Companion to the English Language)

"There is only one situation I can think of in which men and women make an effort to read better than they usually do. When they are in love and reading a love letter, they read for all they are worth. They read every word three ways, they read between the lines and in the margins. They may even take the punctuation into account." -- Unattributed (If you can attirbute this, please email me)

"At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain--how to get the greatest amount of pleasure and work out of it. The secret is, I think, always so to contrive that work is pleasant." - Virginia Wolff

"Welcome to Chinese Restaurant. Please try your nice Chinese food with chopsticks, the traditional and typical of Chinese glorious history and cultural." - Greeting printed on restaurant chopstick wrapper

You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is suffering enough for anyone." - John Ciardi

"An unfinished thought/ to add a page to, not for the thought's sake,/ but for the pleasure of writing the page well,/ if I could write it well. Or if not, for the trying." - John Ciardi ("One Easter Not on the Calendar I Woke" from Echoes)

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must glide on its own melting." - Robert Frost

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

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, from an undated letter to his daughter Scottie. (Source: http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/index.html)

"My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next and the schoolmasters of ever afterward." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing about his first novel, This Side of Paradise. (Source: http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/index.html)

"The demonic paradox of writing: When you put something down that happened, people often don't believe it; whereas you can make up anything and people assume it must have happened to you." - Andrew Holleran (contributed by Kweng-Kwok Leong@HP-Singapore-om2. om.hp.com)

"Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal." - Thomas Carlyle

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