Quotes on Writing or by Writers
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams
“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
Philip Roth
Philip Roth
"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing."
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
“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 [I feel this way about Dean Koontz!]
J.D. Salinger [I feel this way about Dean Koontz!]
"I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done."
Steven Wright
Steven Wright
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
Stephen King
Stephen King
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
"You fail only if you stop writing."
Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
Mark Twain
Mark Twain
"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
George Orwell
George Orwell
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
"My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off."
Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
W. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham
“I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
Robert Frost
Robert Frost
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
Stephen King
Stephen King
"Good writing is like a windowpane."
George Orwell
George Orwell
“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
Elmore Leonard
“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
William Faulkner
"I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech."
Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron
“I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”
Tom Clancy
Tom Clancy
“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money."
Moliere
Moliere
“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”
Lawrence Block
Lawrence Block
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
Stephen King
Stephen King
"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make."
Truman Capote
Truman Capote
“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”
Stephen King
Stephen King
“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman
"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those who move easiest have learned to dance."
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
Harper Lee
Harper Lee
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers."
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
"And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss."
J. K. Rowling
J. K. Rowling