Every man usually has something he can do better
than anyone else. Usually it is reading his own
handwriting.
- Unknown
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out
of the hands of fools. Let's start with
typewriters
- Frank Lloyd Wright
(1868-1959)
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
- Groucho Marx
(1890 - 1977)
There is then creative reading as well as creative
writing
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his
lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.
- Rod Serling
Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing
and it becomes chronic in their sick minds.
- Juvenal (AD 60-130)
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what
I feel in the best and simplest way.
- Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)
Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise
terrific people--if only they'd stop writing.
- Laura Miller
from a salon.com review of the movie Finding Forrester
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes
him proud.
- W. H Auden
English-US poet, dramatist, editor
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
Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as
they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity
itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.
- Stephen Leacock
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.
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable
possession, and therefore are most economical in
its use.
- Mark Twain
Another thing that Bezard taught was how to take
notes and how to set up card files that are useful
a whole lifetime. If I had followed his advice,
today I would have a gold mine; none of my early
work would have been lost.
- Jean Guitton (1901-1999)
A Student's Guide to Intellectual Work [1951], Ch. 5:
Survival, with honor, that outmoded and
all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as
all-important to a writer. Those who do not last
are always more beloved since no one has to see
them in their long, dull, unrelenting,
no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights
that they make to do something as they believe it
should be done before they die. Those who die or
quit early and easy and with every good reason are
preferred because they are understandable and
human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are
more human and more beloved.
- Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)
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
Writing is like cooking...if you spill something,
you should make it look like part of the act.
- John Keeble
Writing is a lot like sex. At first you do it
because you like it. Then you find yourself doing
it for a few close friends and people you like.
But if you're any good at all...you end up doing
it for money.
- Unknown
For a creative writer possession of the truth is
less important than emotional sincerity.
- George Orwell (1903-1950)
English novelist, critic
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated
from the man who wrote it.
- Unknown
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
Better to write for yourself and have no public,
than to write for the public and have no self.
- Cyril Connolly
Nothing, not love, not greed, not passion or
hatred, is stronger than a writer's need to change
another writer's copy.
- Arthur Evans
All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most
of us go on to greater things.
- Bobby Knight
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most
writers.
- T. S. Eliot
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It
should be thrown with great force.
- Dorothy Parker
All of the books in the world contain no more
information than is broadcast as video in a single
large American city in a single year. Not all bits
have equal value.
- Carl Sagan
Those who write clearly have readers, those who
write obscurely have commentators.
- Albert Camus
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I
wrote a long one instead.
- Mark Twain
The man who doesn't read good books has no
advantage over the man who can't read them.
- Mark Twain
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
