quotes

Writing Quotes

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

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."
--Frank Lloyd Wright

"Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull."
--Rod Serling

"Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people--if only they'd stop writing."
--Laura Miller

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

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

"Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs."
--John Osborne

"We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."
--Ray Bradbury

"The desire to write grows with writing."
-Erasmus

"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's works is all I can permit myself to contemplate."
--John Steinbeck

"Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."
--William Strunk, Jr.

"I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me."
--Anna Quindlen

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

"The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
--Mark Twain

"Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, send your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tagline."
-Paul O'Neil

"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain."
-Elie Wiesel

“A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.”
- Thomas Mann

"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one."
- Salman Rushdie

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."
- Richard Bach

(books)

“In the pages of a book you are a princess in a tower or the best shot in the west. In those pages there are no limits to where you can go, who you can be. And no one will ever tell you you’re too young to slay the dragon because it all happens right here where it’s safe.”
- Love Comes Softly