Quotations for Writers

I love quotes on writing. They make me feel better when I can't write, and they make me feel like I'm not alone.
         They are here for easy access for myself and others. If you have one that you'd like to see here, please email it to me.
Featured in the December 2007 Noticing Newbies newsletter as a resource for Writer's Block aid.
Note:
Some of the quotes are unattributed. If you knows the author of any quote, please let me know.

The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and always the reader shall be able to tell the
corpses from the others.
- Mark Twain

Remember that editors do not reject people, only manuscripts. At
worst, editors reject pieces of paper that you typed on; at best, editors send you money. The only opinion that really counts is that of someone who might pay to publish your story.
- George Scithers, Weird Tales magazine

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

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
- Christopher Morley

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
- John Ciardi (1916 - 1986)

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
- Novalis

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.
- Henry David Thoreau

The difference between try and triumph is a little umph.
[unknown]

What a joy it is to find just the right word for the right occasion!
~ Proverbs 15:23

It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.
- Confucius

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
- Benjamin Franklin

Typos, misspellings, and poor sentence structure are distracting and annoying. First impressions are everything, and you do not want to annoy us.
Leucrotapress.com

A needless exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
- Alfred Hitchcock

Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.
- Tom Robbins

The mind, once stretched with a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

This thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.
- Mary Pickford

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

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
- Russell Baker

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
- C.S. Lewis

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. Don't say it was 'delightful'; make us say 'delightful' when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers 'Please, will you do the job for me?'
- C.S. Lewis

"If they give you lined paper, write the other way."
- e.e.cummings


What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.
Both quotes above by: - Stephen King

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

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'
- Saul Bellow

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

All by Winfield Townley Scott:

As a poet one does - simply - the best one can. This is something. Contrast those who work for hire.

When I cannot write poems I feel like a singer who has lost his voice - and with it his excuse for being.

In writing - as indeed in life - one should not strive to be charming.

The price of literary talent is chronic indigestion.

The one sane wish a writer can make: to write something better than he has ever written before.

---
I'm determined to write and publish at least one novel before I die. At the rate I'm going, I'll probably have to live forever.
- Rebecca Snowden, editor, wingedhalo.com

Writing is the only true way I can make sense of my world.
- Wayne Allen Sallee

Writing a story is sort of like falling into a dream.
- HauntedStarr* R 3/06

A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.
- Robert Frost

It's like correcting people's grammar; I don't do it to be popular.
- Frasier Crane

I am trapped inside the soul of a poet,
and words are my only path of escape.

Normal people can produce extraordinary things by simply refusing to leave a blank page blank.
- Chris Baty, creator of NaNoWriMo.org
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
- Leo Rosten

That's something a writer always loves to hear--that our words can make the reader feel something, whether it's love or pain or fear. We love to know that the reader has come along with us for the ride.
- HauntedStarr* R 4/15/08

Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal.
- Lenore Hershey

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.
- Pliny the Elder (23 AD - 79 AD), Natural History

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
- Raymond Chandler (1888 - 1959)

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
- Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004)

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
- Thomas Berger

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
- Austin Phelps


It doesn't even take confidence to write. It only takes confidence to mail out what you've written. In any event, confidence is something one has to come up with on one's own. There will always be better writers than me and I have always been better at some things than at others. If a writer can't live with the fact that whatever he's written is not the best thing ever written and is not perfect in every way, then he'll never survive. You have to reconcile yourself to imperfection.
- Orson Scott Card

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

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
- Kingsley Amis

Do not write so that you can be understood, write so that you cannot be misunderstood.
-Epictetus

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
-Christopher Hampton

The free-lance writer is the person who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
-Robert Benchley

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.
- George Gribbon

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
- William Hazlitt

The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness.
- Julia Ward Howe

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

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
- Joseph Joubert

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.
- George C. Lichtenberg

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.
- James A. Michener

A plagiarist should be made to copy the author 100 times.
- Karl Kraus

Finished! At last, finished! The poem is finished, and my heart has gone out with it.
It is nothing worth mentioning, it occurs three times a day.
- Bunthorne in 'Patience'

I do have dreams of writing a novel. I also have dreams of shooting heat vision out of my eyes and getting all my laundry done.
- Drew Goddard

I cannot live without books.
- Thomas Jefferson

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.
- James Dean

Writing is like cooking...if you spill something,
you should make it look like part of the act.
- John Keeble

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.
- Pablo Picasso

The next three quotes are from Henry David Thoreau:

-How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

-Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

-Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution -- such call I good books.

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.
- W. H. Auden

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
- Walter Bagehot

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
- Arnold Bennett

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.
- Catherine Drinker Bowen

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.
- Joseph Brodsky

Writers are the main landmarks of the past.
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
- Winston Churchill

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
- Charles Caleb Colton

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.
- Patrick Dennis

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
- E. L. Doctorow

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.
- John Farrar

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.
- Gene Fowler

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.
- James Joyce

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
- Ernest Hemingway

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.
- David Hare

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

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.
- Richard Harding Davis

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
- William Faulkner

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.
- Peter Handke

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.
- Horace

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

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.
- Edmund Morrison

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
- Flannery O'Connor

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
- George Orwell

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.
- Leo Rosten

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.
- Socrates

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
- Elie Wiesel

Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.
- Robert Frost

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
- A. J. Liebling

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
- Paul Dirac

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
- Oliver Herford

Writers have two main problems. One is writer's
block, when the words won't come at all, and the other is logorrhea, when the words come so fast
that they can hardly get to the wastebasket in time.
- Cecelia Bartholomew

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.
- Agatha Christie

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
- T. S. Eliot

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
- Tom Clancy

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
- Flannery O'Connor

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.
~ Anais Nin

Fiction is where genius lies.
~ from the song "Demons" by Guster

Bibliophiles, in my experience, usually can't refrain from talking about books they like.
- Eric Flint
First Librarian
http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm

It really was a good read...one of those books you think you dreamed.
- Terry O'Quinn (actor)

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
- Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869)

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
- Leonard Bernstein (1918 - 1990)

I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.
- Arthur C. Clarke, Address to US Congress, 1975

Try to see it in your head, then, as you write it down, leave out the bits that aren't important and write down all the things that are.
         There is no magic formula. To become a competent writer, you write until you start to sound like you, and then you keep on writing. Finish things you start. Get better.
         Always good to remember when you're making art: You don't have to like it, just be ready to do the next thing.
- Neil Gaiman

I don't know why people would want to have lunch with writers. I've eaten with writers. We have appalling table manners, and rarely say anything other than "Pass the salt" or "If you're not going to eat that, can I have it?"
- Neil Gaiman
[Note from Starr: Neil has a delightfully funny and personal journal online that I highly recommend. It can be found at the following link, and I can tell you, once you start reading it, you'll be addicting to his witty writing!]
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp
"I must have said it. It sounds like me, after all." - N.G.

I kept re-naming my protagonist: There's a magic to names, after all. ... I took to trying every name I ran into on him for size, and he looked back at me from somewhere in my head unimpressed every time. It was like trying to name Rumpelstiltskin.
         I kept writing, fascinated. I felt, on the good days, more like the first reader than the writer...
- Neil Gaiman

The characters in the story seem to lead another life, not even remotely like mine. It's sort of like magic and sort of like dreaming.
- R D Larson

I write because I'm afraid to say some things out loud.
- Real Live Preacher weblog, 03-13-05

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
- Rudyard Kipling

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.
~ George Ball

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave for five minutes longer.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that amateurs built the Ark. Professionals built the Titanic.
~ attributed to both Dave Barry and Oprah Winfrey

Knowing I lov'd my books,
he furnish'd me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
- William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "The Tempest"

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 (1920 - 1992)

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.
- Ray Bradbury

All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories -- they write themselves. So out of my imagination, I create these wonderful things, and I look at them and say, My God, did I write that?
- Ray Bradbury

Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write.
- Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

The most important consideration in anything you write is precise communication, and when typos or other errors distract the reader from the message, where's that communication?
montanajlt, former member of W.com

Quotations from Dorothy Parker
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. (attributed)

I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things.

"I know the demon chasing me won't catch up; I also know it's not real, but in
my book I'll outrun it anyway, after all, it's my book." - Davey21 (age 13)

From Mark Twain (1835 - 1910):

Don't say the old lady screamed - bring her onstage and let her scream.

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

When in doubt, delete the adjective!

The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the same as the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

A classic is a book every would like to have read, but no one wants to read.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

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.
[Note from Starr--you can certainly tell that that advice was written last century!]

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
_________

Quotes sent from my friend Warm-blooded Winterdrake :

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
- Paul Valery

Poetry: the best words in the best order.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Critics are by no means the end of the law. Do not think all is over with you because you articles are rejected. It may be that the editor has his drawer full, or that he does not know enough to appreciate you, or you have not gained a reputation, or he is not in a mood to be pleased. A critic's judgment is like that of any intelligent person. If he has experience, he is capable of judging whether a book will sell. That is all.
- Lavina Goodell, Harper's Bazaar

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.
- Mark Twain

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book; if art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for?
- Alice Walker

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity.
It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
- Henry Ward Beecher

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
- Samuel Butler

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
- Robertson Davies

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.
- Ernest Hemingway

What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while... What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
- J. D. Salinger

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. - Henry David Thoreau

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about.
- Benjamin Franklin

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.
- Allan Bloom

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
- Gaston Bachelard

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
- John Berger

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
- Andre Gide

Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it, if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read someone else.
- D. H. Lawrence

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
- Harper Lee

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.
- Montesquieu

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
- John F. Kennedy

Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.
- Sir William Osler

Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
- Paul Tillich

The next few quotes are all from Ernest Hemingway:

-Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

-There is no friend as loyal as a book.

-My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

-Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

-The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, sh*t detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

-Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. ...For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
- Duke of Buckingham

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
- Henry James

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
- Henry Miller

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
- John Barrymore

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives.
- James Joyce

Don't break your heart trying to do what you
don't enjoy just because it is fashionable;
the chances of success would be minimal.
- Isaac Asimov

Imagination is better than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.
-Albert Einstein

Teach my unskilled mind to sing the feelings of my heart.
- Anna Young Smith

One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but percieved from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.
- W.H. Auden

Writing is an acceptable form of schizophrenia.
- E.L. Doctrow

Play with your ideas; thinking should be fun.
- Harold R. McAlindon

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth... But amusing? Never.
- Edna Ferber

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
- Harry Ward Beecher

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle

Facts are the enemy of truth.
- Don Quixote

Perfection is achieved, not when there's nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint Exupery

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
- T.S. Eliot

Telling a story is re-knowing the experience.
- from the video Surviving Columbus.

A good book is theatre of the mind.
-unknown

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
- Charles Horton Cooley

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

Fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.
- Stephen King

Writers aren't exactly people; they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

A book must be an ice axe to break the frozen sea within us.
- Franz Kafka

The job of the artist is to always deepen the mystery.
-Francis Bacon

An artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run downhill.
- W. Somerset Maugham

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
- Lawrence Durrell

I am not a writer; I don't have the imagination for it. I am more like a pen.
by Renée


---All of the following are from Stephen King:

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

When you write, ask yourself frequently, "Am I having fun?"
The answer needn't always be yes. But if it's always no, it's time for a new project or a new career.

To know [where the story is going], I have to write it.
--------------

Every artist dips his brush into his own soul,
and paints his own nature into his pictures.
-Henry W. Beecher

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

Never be so brief as to become obscure.
- Tryon Edwards

If you describe things as better than they are, you are a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are a satirist.
- Quentin Crisp

Never give up, and always allow a stranger to read your work. They may find something that a close friend may not be willing to tell you.
- unknown

Writing is problem solving.
- unknown

The following were submitted by my friend Kevin Bozard:

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
- Mel Brooks

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.
- Paul J. Meyer

I was brought up in the great tradition of the
late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
- James A. Michener

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living,
with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
- Olin Miller

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
- Iris Murdoch

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
- Craig Raine

If you write a book on failure, and it doesn't sell, is it a success?
-Neil K.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.
- Salman Rushdie

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.
- Nancy Banks Smith

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
- James Thurber

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
- Leo Tolstoy

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
- Mary Heaton Vorse

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

Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.
- John Wesley

Writing is thinking on paper.
- William Zinsser

When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.
- T.S. Eliot

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
- Henry Ward Beecher

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.
- William Cobbett

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
- William S. Burroughs

In six pages, I can't even say hello.
- James Michener

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

Good writing is essentially clear thinking made visible.
- Ambrose Bierce

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

Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
- Edwin Schlossberg

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

The cure for writer's cramp is writer's block.
- Inigo DeLeon

Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.
- Fran Lebowitz


I am the author of my own lifestory. The only problem is that I am writing in pen and can't erase my mistakes. [author unknown]

A writer...writes until inspiration catches up with him.[author unknown]

Opportunities do not come to those who wait; they are captured by those who attack.
[author unknown]

A backwards poet writes inverse.
[author unknown]

I certainly don't (enjoy writing). I get a warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of
getting started each day.
Let's face it, writing is hell.
- William Styron

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
- Robert Frost

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

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
- Cyril Connolly

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
- Samuel Butler

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
- Joseph Chilton Pearce

The way you define yourself, as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
- John Irving

You should see my poetry in "MS Word". It looks like a literary massacre.
Oh, but my English teacher would faint.
--created by wordsy

Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.
- Angela Monet

"Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
‘Fool!' said my Muse to me,
‘look in thy heart and write.'"
-- Philip Sidney

...time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions...
- T. S. Eliot

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. -- Somerset Maugham
[Oh no, he caught me! LOL --Starr*]

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair.
If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is.
- William Zinsser

A touch of class, flash of elegance can mark the differene between unremarkable clarity and a thougt so elegantly shaped that not only fixes itself in the mind of our readers forever, but gives them a moment of pleasure when they recall it.
- Joseph Williams

A room without books is like a body without a soul. - Cicero

Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.
- John Jakes

The writer should not follow rules, but follow language toward meaning, always seeking to understand what is appearing on the page, to see it clearly, to evaluate it clearly, for clear thinking will produce clear writing.
- Donald Murray

Re-vision is the re-seeing the topic so the writer can discover meaning. Editing is making the meaning clear so a reader can understand meaning.
- Donald Murray

My language is my verbal flag.
- Daglarca

A good sermon should be like a woman's skirt:
short enough to arouse interest
but long enough to cover the essentials.
- Ronald Knox

Not completing to read the book is like not completing the road you're on.
~ Chinese proverb

People so often confuse the person with the work. ...[But] they are not one and the same.
- David Cronenberg

As a sword to a samurai, my pencil is my soul.
submitted by Aeon

If a doctor told me I only had six minutes to live,
I'd type a little faster.
- Isaac Asimov

The purpose of revision is not to correct, but to discover.
- Lucy McCormick Calkins

Don't write the parts people don't read.
- Elmore Leonard

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs

Write everyday, filling your life with fearless imagination.
~Sue Grafton

It's none of their business that you have to learn to write.
Let them think you were born that way.
- Ernest Hemingway

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

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
- Charles de Montesquieu

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
- Daphne du Maurier

Some old lady said that my book left a bad taste in her mouth.
I wrote back to her and said, "You weren't supposed to eat it."
- Flannery O'Connor

This is the writer's constant challenge - getting the reader to see what we see.
- HauntedStarr* R 2007

Writing that springs from the surface of existence--when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up--is nothing,
and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake.
That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.
- Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams.
- Stephen King

Every artist was first an amateur.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writing is a form of prayer.
- Franz Kafka

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
- Barbara Kingslover, author of "The Poisonwood Bible"

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy to be called an idea at all.
- Hubbard

I like my own writing best. I quote myself from time to time, saying, 'a poet once said,' and
then filling in with one of my own lines appropriate to the occasion.
- John Ashbury

I write for the same reason I breathe--
because if I didn't, I would die.
- Isaac Asmiov (a.k.a. the adorable Dr. A.)

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
- Sir Francis Bacon

Where is human nature so weak, as in the bookstore?
- Henry Ward Beecher

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
- Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964)

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
- G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
- G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

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

I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.
- Charles De Secondat

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist:
Give me leave to do my utmost.
- Isak Dinesen

I am two fools, I know: for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.
- John Donne

Never judge a book by its movie.
- J. W. Eagan

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
- Paul Gaugin

Art is a collaboration between God and the
artist, and the less the artist does the better.
- Andre Gide

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
- W. Somerset Maugham

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear
of being wrong.
- Joseph Chilton Pearce

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
- Plato

Poetry often enters through the
window of irrelevance.
- M. C. Richards

I shall live badly if I do not write,
and I shall write badly if I do not live.
- Francoise Sagan

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter.... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
- E. B. White

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it whole-heartedly and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings.
- Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Submitted by Reannon :
What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings,
and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set
them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.
- H.L. Mencken

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.
~ Robert Cromier

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ASK questions. If I had answers I'd be a politician.
~ Eugene Ionesco

Verbs are the fuel of the English language. You can toss all your adjectives in the trash and
still be able to say something, but without verbs you have only a collection of words.
(I don't know the author who wrote this...do you?)

God gave us memories so that we might have roses in December.
- J.M. Barrie

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
- Red Smith, sportswriter

The smell of ink is intoxicating to me - others may have wine, but I have poetry.
- Abbe Yeux-verdi

...for writing fiction which truly succeeds, it has to get into the writer as well as the reader...into my head and my heart...
- Edward Bryant

A writer must constanly prove that he (she) has nothing better to do that bare their soul for all the world to see.

A writer writes always.

All of the following by Anne Lamott.
*One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can't.

*Good writing is about telling the truth.

*Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.

*Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something - anything - down on paper.

*You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.

*A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
***

Fiction is where genius lies.
~ from the song "Demons" by Guster

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
- Leonard Bernstein (1918 - 1990)

If you can't make a drawing of a man who has thrown himself out of a fourth floor window before he hits the ground, you will never be able to paint great works.
- Eugene Delacroix to Baudelaire

Write hard and clear about what hurts.
- Hemingway

Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.
- E.B. White

In literature class, the students were given an assignment to write a short story involving all the important ingredients -- nobility, emotion, sex, religion, and mystery. A student wrote: "My God! cried the duchess, "I'm pregnant! Who did it?"
- source unknown

I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)
"Lettres provinciales", letter 16, 1657

The smartest thing I ever did was invent somebody who now supports me.
- Sue Grafton

Put it before them briefly so they will read it,
clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it,
and above all, accurately so
they will be guided by its light.
- Joseph Pulitzer

The one man who should never attempt an explanation on poetry is its author. If the poem can be improved by its author's explanations, it never should have been published.
- Archibald MacLeish

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
- Marianne Moore

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
- Cicero

As I write I create myself again and again.
- Joy Harjo


Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you.
--William Arthur Ward

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. -- Mark Twain

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
- Leo Buscaglia, the man who made hugging cool.

When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know.
- Ambrose Bierce

Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
- Ambrose Bierce

Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier.
~Mother Teresa

"Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go."
e. e. cummings

Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday.
[unknown]

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- Benjamin Franklin

It's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
- Kenneth G. Libbrecht

Be wary of men who know their way out of the dog house. They've probably spent a lot of time there. [unknown]

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
--Theodore M. Hesburgh


TEACHER: Sam, your composition on "My Dog" is exactly the same as your brother's. Did you copy his?
SAM: No, teacher, it's the same dog.

---

You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
- Native American Wisdom

Be a good human being, a warm-hearted affectionate person. That is my fundamental belief. Having a sense of caring, a feeling of compassion will bring happiness or peace of mind to oneself and
automatically create a positive atmosphere.
-Dalia Lama, 1935

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
- Albert Einstein

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
-- Albert Einstein

Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem.
- ex-President Ronald Reagan

...[B]ravery in its truest form, reveals itself to us most often in the telling of a secret.
- William Faulkner

If you do what you love for a living you will never have to work a day in your life. [unknown]

The following quotes were found at:
http://www.postsecret.blogspot.com/

If we ever encountered life somewhere in space, look at the world we have to show them.
Marco, Montreal, Canada

The things that make us feel so abnormal, are actually the things that make us all the same.
- New Zealand

If everyone who has ever had a 'shameful' secret like those on your site stood up together and were connected, I do believe that there would be a spider web connecting the world together, holding it together better than any charity, church, governmental program or foundation can because these are just normal people speaking to other normal people about their fears, without fear. I find that beautiful.
- Wisconsin

It's ok to be scared and angry and hurt and selfish. It's part of being human.
-Ohio
---

Happily, I've never been one to let society's expections make decisions for me.
- HauntedStarr* R

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
-Attributed to W. H. Auden

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
- Oscar Wilde

Some fun general stuff:

Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours. -Yogi Berra.


GREAT TRUTHS ABOUT LIFE THAT LITTLE CHILDREN HAVE LEARNED:

1) No matter how hard you try, you can't baptize cats.

2) When your Mom is mad at your Dad, don't let her brush your hair.

3) If your sister hits you, don't hit her back. They always catch the second person.

4) Never ask your 3-year old brother to hold a tomato.

5) You can't trust dogs to watch your food.

6) Don't sneeze when someone is cutting your hair.

7) Never hold a Dust-Buster and a cat at the same time.

8) You can't hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk.

9) Don't wear polka-dot underwear under white shorts.

10) The best place to be when you're sad is Grandpa's lap.
---


Education isn't everything. For instance, it isn't an elephant.
- Spike Milligan

Dare To Be different. Dare to do your best.
[author identity needed!]

I would rather be a failure at something I love, than a success at something I hate.
- George Burns

May the Lord watch between you and me
when we are absent one from another.
- Genesis 31:49 NKJV

You only live once, but if you do it right,
once is enough.
- Mae West

No matter where you are, we know that as long as you have each other, you have your family, and you are home.
- Lemony Snicket

I feel young, but my body doesn't agree.
-Bryant Gumbel

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
- Henry David Thoreau

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
that word is love.
- Sophocles

Everything has beauty but not everyone sees it.
- Confucius

Time is the bridge that burns behind us.
- Poul Anderson

Write on your hearts that every day is the
best day of the year.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stupid people like to delude themselves that while they may not be clever, they were at least able to compensate with feelings and insights denied to the intellectual....It was precisely this kind of false belief that made stupid people so stupid. The truth was the clever people had infinitely more resources from which to make the leaps of connection that the world called intuition. What was 'intelligence' after all, but the ability to read into things?
- Stephen Fry

---
The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe.
          This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe?
          Augustine didn't reply: 'He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.'
         Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.
- Stephen Hawking, from A Brief History of Time