Quotes On Writing
Writers on writing:
“I write the first sentence and trust in God for the next.” Laurence Sterne
“You must write every single day of your life…You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads….may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” Ray Bradbury
“A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes.” William Sansom
“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
Somerset Maugham
“Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward…” Franz Kafka
“The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.” Arthur Schopenhauer
“A woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Virginia Woolf
“Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.” Robert Penn Warren
“Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.”
“The first draft of anything is sh*t.” Ernest Hemingway
“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightening.” James Dickey
“I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.” Henry David Thoreau
“You must write for yourself, above all. That is [your] only hope of creating something beautiful.” Gustave Flaubert
“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” Gloria Steinem
Writers on Revision:
“In a writer there must always be two people – the writer and the critic.” Leo Tolstoy
“Revise and revise and revise – the best thought will come after the printer has snatched away the copy.” Michael Morahan
“Suspect all your favorite sentences.” Kenneth Atchity
“Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing….” Bernard Malamud
“Use the right word and not its second cousin.” Mark Twain
“You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.” Robert Frost
Writers on Publishing:
“You fail only if you stop writing.” Ray Bradbury
“Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.” Mark Twain
“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” Cyril Connolly
“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