Writing Quotations

---

“I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts are confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning.”
-C.S. Lewis

“Publishers love books. They love them so much they hate to part with them.”
-Eric Hatch

“A world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots.”
-Paul Graham

“When you sell someone a book, you don’t merely sell them a half-pound of paper and ink and glue. You sell them a doorway to a different world or at least a different world view. You sell them opportunity. Inspiration. Sometimes consolation and comforting. Sometimes reassurance. Hope and encouragement. You help them develop their own life philosophy.”
-Dan Kennedy, “My Unfinished Life”

“If you can force your message to be read, and hold it thus to pierce the reader’s head; if you can in him arouse a quick desire, and heap on wordy coals to feed that fire; if you can steer but one idea clear through, and shoot it like a rocket from the blue to sell your prospect in that time bound span ¾ you are a darned good advertising man.”
-Anonymous

“All the horrors in the world can’t compare to the terrors of the blank page.”
-R.L. Stine

“There is of course no beginning. There is no end. A story starts when you want to start telling it and stops when you want to finish. That’s the way it is with everything.”
-Marc Hamer

“Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own.”
-Rose Horowitch

“Writing is hard. At its heart, it’s the act of describing the near-ineffable fog of human consciousness, of sharing with other minds what it means to be us.”
-Jon Gingerich

“I want things to dominate, so filling the thought of the bearer that he does not even remember the words. I like the kind of speech which is simple and natural, the same on paper as on the lip: speech which is rich in matter, sinewy, brief and short.”
-Montaigne

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
-Joan Didion

“Advice to young writers? The one essential quality is curiosity, in my opinion, and the energy to get out and learn about the world and about people who lead unique lives, who dwell in obscure places.”
-Gay Talese

“You can always use fewer words. Also, be lucky enough to find something you love to write or paint or sculpt about, and then make it.”
-Oliver Clements

“Any part of your life, or your life in its entirety, could be a dream whose meaning you have forgotten.”
-Quentin S. Crisp

“I’d never structured my life around an alarm clock and a calendar. I was in the habit of staying up as long as I wanted and sleeping as late as I wanted, and deciding for myself what I would do with each day as it came along.”
-Lawrence Block

“All through my boy hood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the patterns of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

“Why write without being sure that the writing will be read?”
-Peter C. Baker

“In writing, high hourly fees are a result of ease and speed.”
-Rebecca Matter

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”
-Kurt Vonnegut

“Writing, as an activity, is inherently boring for anyone other than the writer.”
-Mark O’Connell

“We are a machine built by God to write poetry to glorify his creatures.”
-Raphael Carter

“The truth is that when I’m writing, I wrote every day, workaholic dweeb or not. That includes Christmas, the Fourth of July, and my birthday…For me, not working is the real works. When I’m writing, it’s all playground…”
-Stephen King

“One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.”
-Wilfrid Sheed

“There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”
-H.L. Mencken

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

“If I didn’t have writing, I’d be running down the street hurling grenades in people’s faces.”
-Paul Fussell

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
-Arthur C. Clarke

“The supremely important person in anyone’s life is himself.”
-Robert Heinlein

“Books…are not there to allow you to escape, but to give you information about the human condition, which is a thing you cannot escape.”
-Hilary Mantel

“Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.”
-Peter Ustinov

“I've grown to realize the joy that comes from little victories is preferable to the fun that comes from ease and the pursuit of pleasure.”
-Lawana Blackwell

“Books grace our shelves and fill our homes with beauty; they dwell in our minds and occupy our thoughts. Books prompt us to spend pleasant hours alone and connect us with fellow readers. They invite us to escape into their pages for an afternoon, and they inspire us to reimagine our lives. Good reading journals provide glimpses of how we’ve spent our days, and they tell the story of our lives.”
-Anne Bogel

“Words are free, but using the wrong one may cost you.”
-Brian Clark

“People will absolutely focus on long-form content... it just has to be a topic they’re passionate about.”
-Neil Patel

“Books write our life story, and as they accumulate on our shelves…they become chapters in it themselves. How could it be otherwise?”
-Anne Fadiman

“Reading isn’t just a way to pass the time—it’s a lifestyle. Books shape, define, and enchant us. They are part of who we are and we can’t imagine life without them.”
-Anne Bogel

“I am a writer, dedicated to crafting engaging and informative articles that captivate and inspire readers. With a deep-seated passion for writing, I am committed to delivering high-quality content that not only informs but also sparks meaningful discussions and provokes thought.”
-Jason Jang

“Sure, sometimes it pays to take pains. But other times, maybe even most of the time, there's a lot to be said for working fast.”
-John Forde

“As crazy as it might sound, I meet a surprising number of fledgling authors who don't read very widely and can't really discuss books other than their own. I think one of the secrets of being a novelist who lasts is to read across genres and not be confined to fiction, nonfiction, or other specialty lanes.”
-C.J. Box

“Advice is just ego and ignorance disguised as helpfulness.”
-Dilbert (Scott Adams)

“It is with words that we must express our thoughts, and if we are to make use of higher forms of truth, we may use only such material as has been carefully and intelligently selected with this purpose in view.”
-Charles F. Haanel

“Anytime you teach how-to without pointing out what not to, you shortchange the reader.”
-Nicolas Cole

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.”
-Mark Twain

“A story starts when you want to start telling it and stops when you want to finish.”
-Marc Hamer

“It took me 15 years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because, by then, I was too famous.”
-Robert Benchley

“Truth may or may not he stranger than fiction, but, by God, it’s less entertaining, and nowhere near as realistic.”
-Lawrence Block

“Writing is something that you can do, and do well, if you know how to get out of the way of yourself first—and organize what comes burbling out into something that can powerfully communicate your thoughts and feelings.”
-Gareth Branwyn

“Remind yourself that being a writer is a really awesome job. It’s very easy to get bogged down when you’re writing, and there are times when it is excruciating. Being a writer is an incredible privilege. Yes, it’s hard and stressful and demanding and frustrating but it’s also an act of pure invention … a license to talk to just about anyone and to tell stories to anyone who will listen. When you’re stuck or discouraged or tired, you have to remind yourself of that, and bring that joy and excitement to the page.”
-Susan Orlean

“Published is better than perfect: We would rather get it published than wait and perfect it. We can always change things later.”
-Michael Stelzner

“I felt words in my soul … I couldn’t write what I couldn’t understand or feel, what I couldn’t love, and definitely what I couldn’t trust. No matter how much someone would pay me.”
-Jillian Cantor

“We must contain stories upon stories, stories without end.”
-Kate DiCamillo

“Every artist must exist in two realms: as the art maker….and as the art mover, who, however reluctantly, must be part showman and part businessman.”
-Xochitl Gonzalez

“Life is a joke laughing at itself!”
-Mark Ford

“Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.”
-C.S. Lewis

“I never gave up on print. Reading online is efficient, pleasurable, and satisfying—and I love Twitter as much as ever—but nothing beats a Sunday afternoon on the couch with a newly purchased pile of magazines.”
-Chris Black

“An essay that is handwritten can be better than, equal to, or worse than a typewritten essay. What is more important than the method of getting words on paper is the author's understanding and mastery of the language in which they are writing.”
-Jordan Porter

“Being a writer who does not read is like being a Tesla that is never taken to a charging station--out of fuel and dead in its tracks.”
-Bob Bly

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's reals and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
-George Orwell

“I am not at all in a humour for writing; I must write on till I am.”
-Jane Austen

“At times the writing trade is nothing more than selling experiences, selling moments. This has never struck me as exactly a noble profession. I wish being a writer did not so often mean trying to make people want things.”
-John Jerome

“Your job as a journalist isn’t to say that he says it’s raining but she says it's not. Your job is to look out the goddamn window!”
-Steve Lovelady, Managing Editor, Philadelphia Inquirer

“Man is not alone in the universe. There’s more out there than we can possibly know. More than we would ever want to know…some secrets are best left buried.”
-David Sodergren

“Don't listen to writers who say writing is hard. Writing isn't hard—it's fun. If you start out thinking writing is hard, it will be hard for you.”
-R.L. Stine

“A piece of writing ought not to be planned for a given size but developed to the length most suitable to the material, and no farther.”
-John McPhee

“A book is something like a house…built of thoughts hewn from rough material.”
-Mark Morgan Ford

“Forget about inspiration, because it’s more likely to be a reason not to write, as in, ‘I can’t write today because I’m not inspired.’ I tell them I used to live next to my landlady and I told everybody she inspired me. And the most valuable characteristic any would-be writer can possibly have is persistence. Just keep at it, keep learning your craft and keep trying.”
-Octavia Butler

“I believe brevity is the soul of wit…unless I’m getting paid by the word.”
-Rachael Lubarsky

“No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as life.”
-Agota Kristof

“A strange feeling grips me as I write. I do not feel tired. I seem filled with a strong vigor. The past seems vague and far away, while the future spreads before me, full of mystery.”
-Walter B. Gibson

“The trouble is, you get used to hell.”
-Doris Lessing

“Anyone can write a piece of content, but not everyone can leave a lasting impression with the content they write.”
-Saads Abraham

“Emotions are the enemy of clear thought.”
-P.N. Elrod

“It’s important that the reader know and like the author, and you should always strive to make yourself likable in your writing.”
-Gary Provost

“Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own: He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.”
-John Dryden

“There are 3 basic science fiction story conventions: A single man can change the course of a whole world….The only measure of intelligence is its linear and practical application.… The Universe is an essentially hospitable place--full of earth-type planets where you can find adventure.”
-Samuel R. Delaney

“I can quietly affirm, and will be able to quietly confirm on judgment day, that I write what crosses my mind, what I think, what I am.”
-Emmanuel Carrera

“The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. All you have to do is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.”
-Shirley Jackson

“When research takes me offline to libraries and arc hives…I can’t stop at the magazine or journal pages I was looking for; I want to read everything, from masthead to classifieds.”
-Brian Dillon

“Words placed in a certain order—following an absolute necessity—[are] beautiful.”
-Marina Jarre

“Don't give up. The writers whose books you love, whose books fill your shelves and nightstands, who you have memorized, made beloved, quoted, and shared, are the ones who didn't give up. Work to build resilience into your practice, and just keep writing.”
-Megan Baxter

“Every writer thinks someone else is working on his subject; it is part of the paranoid state of mind necessary for the completion of the infinitely postponable task of writing.”
-Janet Malcolm

“For a writer—or anyone in the arts, really—not doing something that involves risk is a path to a slow death.”
-Robert McCammon

“Think not of the books you’ve bought as a ‘to be read’ pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.”
-Luc van Donkersgood

“Writing is something you do alone. It's a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.”
-John Green

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
-E.L. Doctorow

“Writers only have one story to tell. And that’s our story. And we dress is up in different clothes and different times and places, but it’s still our story.”
-Elizabeth Engstrom

“Language is a map leading to a place not on the map.”
-Simon Van Booy

“My house is a library with living rooms attached.”
-Bernard Berenson

“Along my walls bookshelves sit full of great works. Writings and episodes which reveal in their pages the secrets of the….world.”
-Kev Freeman

“Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.”
-Raymond Carver

“My own philosophy is that one should share what wisdom he has, one should help others to help themselves and one should keep going despite heavy weather, for there is always a calm ahead.”
-L. Ron Hubbard

“My agent Mas Wilkinson wrote to me after I complained about what a disagreeable profession I had: ‘Dear Kurt – I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil.’”
-Kurt Vonnegut

“For the sake of the pay envelope on the first of each month, I passed my days in captivity.”
-W.W. Jacobs on having worked as a post office clerk

“Many people are tired simply because they are not interested in anything...You only lose energy when life becomes dull in your mind.”
-Norman Vincent Peale

“I think most writers, even the best, overwrite. I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek.”
-Truman Capote

“If the writing can’t be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it?”
-Raymond Carver

“It’s quite common to enter a library and find yourself in conversation with the dead. The best minds of generations long gone crowd every bookshelf. They wait there to be noticed, to be addressed, and to reply in turn. In the library the dead meet the living on collegial terms a a matter of course, every day.”
-Joe Hill

“A writer--a person whose most absorbing and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.”
-Joan Didion

“The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s words in print.”
-Joan Didion

“You might be surprised at the wisdom and knowledge old books can have.”
-Kevin Michael Guest

“I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.”
-Roger Zelazny

“Write what you enjoy writing. Don't write for money or follow the trends of what might be selling at the time. Write something that you cannot only be proud of, but also enjoy the process of writing.”
-Christopher J. Moore

“I have always been a firm believer in my right to do anything I cannot be stopped from doing. I give everything I am at the moment to what I write and I enjoy it in the same capacity.”
-Roger Zelazny

“A writer is always alone with the dreams. And when the dreams are rejected, there is a time when the only God they know—the validity of their talent--is up for question. Those who see the greener grass in a writer’s territory never understand that terror.”
-Harlan Ellison

“The truth is, it’s not the idea, it’s never the idea, it’s always what you do with it.”
-Neil Gaiman

“Long patience and application saturated with your heart's blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.”
-Jim Tully

“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
-Philip Roth

“Your books are second only to you in importance. Readers will only keep buying your books and tell everyone they know to read them if your books deliver.”
-David Hancock

“Success means your thinking coincides with a need.”
-Hugh Kenner, literary critic

“I’ve written 6 books and spent 12 years doing it. Twelve years is a long time to be doing anything. But I’ve learned the longer you stay on one track, the harder it becomes to imagine changing your profession. And like anything in life, part of commitment to a single direction means conviction, immersion, honing your skills, and getting damn good at what you do.”
-Tony Vanderwarker

“The nature of most good writing is you find out things as you go along.”
-Anne Lamott

“I write because I love writing. It doesn't matter what genre. I want to write something so unique and different that my children's children's children will someday read it and say, ‘My great-great-grandma wrote that -- she sure was a character! I wish I had known her.”
-C.J. Heck

“The slowness of book reading, its gradual nature, is beneficial. Books provide a kind of corner in life where you can go and sit and collect your thoughts. You can grow and put ideas together in new ways that you cannot when you are only looking for what you know is already there, as with search engines on the Internet.”
-James Mustich, Jr.

“The process of writing is a lonely endeavor. You miss out on time spent with family and friends, hoping the words you're putting down will entertain basic strangers out there in the insane world.”
-Hunter Shea

“I started writing when I was eight—out of the blue…not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master.”
-Truman Capote

“I must write. If I stop writing my life will be an abject failure…I will not have earned death.”
-Jean Rhys

“To take my work seriously would be the height of folly.”
-Edward Gorey

“I receive about two hundred pieces of mail a day. Most of it is the sort of casual conversation that glutes the email chute. The kind of thing that we used to write in a brief letter or postcard—and because we actually had to do the job in a finite space, we tried to keep the imbecile blather to a minimum.”
-Harlan Ellison

“Advice for writers: There are stories everywhere within view, within range … [and] the one essential quality is curiosity, in my opinion, and the energy to go out and learn about the world and about people who lead unique lives, who dwell in obscure places.”
-Gay Talese

“Within words….you drink those sentences down, and they prop up the dreams you keep inside you, and they spark something up there in your brain, and when you’re done you’ve got a bellyful of the most dangerous liquor on earth … you’ve got yourself a story … one you can really believe.”
-Norman Patridge

“My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semicolons. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.”
-Kurt Vonnegut

“The secret of great writing is that it is as much what you do as what you don’t do. While there is no common definition of great, all great books have the common feature of lacking content that isn’t great. Great books do not contain ‘un-great’ stuff.”
-Dawn Field (Book Baby, 8/4/22)

“It’s a strange thing to be a writer, to argue with yourself about the way things are and should be, and committing those arguments to paper for others to read. It requires a level of self-awareness shaped by tireless observation of the world, and an internal dialogue picking that same world apart.”
-Lisa Bubert

“What is a good writer? Well, in my opinion a good writer is one who makes things perfectly clear. He makes it easy for the reader. Easy to understand what he is saying, easy to keep reading.”
-Gary Halbert

“To create: not to make something out of nothing, but to make order out of chaos…a creative writer does not make up new words but arranges familiar words in patterns which say something fresh to us.”
-Harold S. Kushner

“My advice to writers would be to aggressively seek the truth –forget about your ego—and do one more draft than your agent tells you to.”
-Jonathan Karp

“If you have a story to tell, the most important thing is the story, not the form you use to shape it.”
-Patricia Smith

“Two percent of the people think, three percent think they think, and 95 percent of the people would rather die than think.”
-George Bernard Shaw

“If you have any young friends who aspire to be writers, shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
-Dorothy Parker

“It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.”
-Gustav Flaubert

“The freedom to choose or reject ideas, to read books of our choice, and to publish freely is the very bedrock of our free society. The First Amendment is a prohibition of governmental interference with free speech.”
-Kurt Vonnegut

“Typewriters are the stepping stones to any high office.”
-Ayn Rand, “We the Living” film, 80th anniversary edition.

“For even in the age of digitalization the bookshelf remains a popular and beloved icon. Every day, thousands of scientists, clergymen, artists, and politicians are posed by photographers and cameramen before bookshelves, patently in hopes that their filmed ten-second-statements will thereby somehow gain in gravity. A world growing faster day by day stands in desperate need of such unambiguous signs. To this day, the bookshelf seems to serve that particular end.”
-Burkhard Spinnen, ‘The Book An Homage”

“Writing is not a profession on which one embarks under duress. No one forces anyone to become a writer. No one even asks him. He writes because he enjoys writing, and if he doesn’t enjoy it he should get out of the profession.”
-Leslie McFarlane, “Ghost of the Hardy Boys” (Godine, 2022, p. 268).

“Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad it caught me. I've never walked into this room and looked at this typewriter without feeling that something somewhere, some strange gods or something utterly unnamable has touched me with a blithering, blathering and wondrous luck that holds and holds and holds.”
-Charles Bukowski, “On Writing” (Ecco)

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
-Christopher Hitchens

“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.”
-Eugene Ionesco

“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.”
-Aristotle

“When the research and writing is going well, the work itself provides a positive return. When the work is hard, I remind myself that the [writing] has a purpose, and I value that purpose. And that, to me, justifies the work and time.”
-Mark Ford