| Citat |
Sagt av |
| Att kunna vara kortfattad visar tecken på vishet. | Sophocles (496 f.Kr.-406 f.Kr.) |
| Att skriva är en fråga om att finna tillräckligt små ord till tillräckligt stora känslor. | Hans Borli (1918-1989) |
| Den som inte har lärt sig begränsningens konst, har inte lärt sig att skriva. | Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711) |
| Det absolut bästa rådet till en författare är detta, tror jag: Försök att lära dig ta djupa andetag, att verkligen känna smaken av det du äter, och då du sover, sov. Försök av alla krafter att leva helt och fullt, och när du skrattar, skratta utav bara helvete och blir du arg - bli det fullt ut. Försöka känna att du lever. Snart nog är du död. | William Saroyan (1908-1981) |
| Det här brevet blev längre än vanligt, för jag hade inte tid att skriva kortare. | Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) |
| Det som skrivs utan ansträngning, blir som regel läst utan glädje. | Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) |
| Du skriver inte för att du vill säga någonting, du skriver därför att du har någonting att säga. | Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) |
| En man kan skriva när som helst om han verkligen går in för det. | Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) |
| För att en metafor ska vara bra bör den alltid vara en bild som man kan måla. | François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778) |
| För mycket av de goda kan bli underbart | Toni Morrison (1931-) |
| inte visste jag att alla de där dagarna som gick var livet | Ring Lardner (1885-1933) |
| Jag börjar alltid skriva med rena ark och smutsiga tankar. | Patrick Dennis |
| Jag skriver aldrig om dagen. Det skulle vara som att springa igenom ett köpcenter utan kläder. Alla kan se dig. Om natten... det är då du trollar... magi. | Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) |
| Jag är emot att sätta in figurer i litteraturen med samma lättvindighet som man sätter barn till världen. | Olaf Bull |
| Jag är författare för att skriva är det jag gör bäst. | Flannery O'Connor |
| Man måste skriva en hel del för att förstå vad man inte ska skriva. | Arnljot Eggen (1923-) |
| Man skriver utifrån det man gjort sig själv till. | Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) |
| När det gäller adjektiv: Tvivlar du, stryk | Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
| Om det finns en grundton i det jag skriver så är det insikten om att allt är förbi. | Lars Saabye Christensen (1953-) |
| Om jag skulle ge unga författare ett råd så skulle det vara att inte lyssna på det författare säger om sig själv eller om skrivande. | Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) |
| Räkna ut vad som förorsakar dig störst skada, och skriv om det. | Helge Krog (1889-1962) |
| Språket består av klichéer. Använd dem som om de aldrig blivit använda förr! | Alf Larsen (1885-1967) |
| Syftet med (uppsats-)skrivandet är att blåsa upp svaga idéer, ludda till resonemangen och undvika tydlighet. Med lite träning kan texten bli en skrämmande och ogenomtränglig dimma. | Calvin/Hobbes |
| Varje gång jag har skrivit fyra ord, stryker jag tre. | Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711) |
| Han skriv, men når han les det etterpå, så er det ikkje noko å vise fram. Det er berre framtvinga ord. Ikkje liv i dei. | Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970) |
| With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs. | James Thurber (1894-1961) |
| Writing ...is the great invention of the world. | Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) |
| The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. | Agatha Christie (1890-1976) |
| Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators. | Albert Camus (1913-1960) |
| When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day. | Alberto Moravia (1907-1990) |
| Most authors steal their works, or buy. | Alexander Pope (1688-1744) |
| Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. | Alexander Pope (1688-1744) |
| Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for. | Alice Walker (1944-) |
| Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence. | Alice Walker (1944-) |
| If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. | Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) |
| It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. | Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) |
| My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living. | Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) |
| I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living. | Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) |
| A critic is a legless man who teaches running | Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) |
| The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels. | Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) |
| The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little -- or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives. | Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) |
| A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke. | Arthur Miller (1915-2005) |
| Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to. | Carl Van Doren |
| To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author. | Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832) |
| The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master- something that at time strangely wills and works for itself. | Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) |
| Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. | Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) |
| The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen. | Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) |
| Writing only leads to more writing. | Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) |
| All autobiography is self-indulgent. | Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) |
| Great writing can't be taught, but bad writing can be avoided. | Dennis Mahoney |
| I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well. | Donald Marquis (1878-1937) |
| The pen is mightier than the sword. | Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) |
| Writers are the main landmarks of the past. | Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) |
| Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite. | Edward Albee (1928-) |
| I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do. | Edward Albee (1928-) |
| The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. | Elias Canetti (1905-1994) |
| Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent. | Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) |
| We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. | Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) |
| An author ought to write for the youth of his generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward. | F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) |
| There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good | F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) |
| I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial. | Flannery O'Connor |
| It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have. | Flannery O'Connor |
| There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. | Flannery O'Connor |
| When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business. | Flannery O'Connor |
| All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. Actually, I suppose that's probably an outmoded phrase, because I don't think criminals feel like criminals anymore. I feel like criminals used to feel when they felt guilty. | Fran Lebowitz (1950-) |
| An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. | François René de Chateaubriand (1776-1848) |
| I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live. | Françoise Sagan (1935-) |
| The function of the novelist . . . is to comment upon life as he sees it. | Frank Norris (1870-1902) |
| Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. | Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) |
| Some people are born knowing how to tell a story. They have a sense of timing, of organization of facts. After that, it is a long way to becoming a writer. | Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-) |
| An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats | George Orwell (1903-1950) |
| The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession. | George Sand (1804-1876) |
| Acting is like roller skating. Once you know how to do it, it is neither stimulating nor exciting. | George Sanders (1906-) |
| I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought. | Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) |
| Writing ...keeps me from believing everything I read. | Gloria Steinem (1935-) |
| How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live | Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) |
| If the desire to write is not accompanied by the actual writing, then the desire is not to write. | Hugh Prather |
| Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck. | Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) |
| Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process. | Isabel Allende (1942-) |
| Regardless of the criticisms I receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it's important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up. | Ishmael Reed (1938-) |
| Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence. | Ishmael Reed (1938-) |
| The waste basket is the writer's best friend. | Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) |
| Writing is turning one's worst moments into money. | J. P. Donleavy (1926-) |
| I am told that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it. | J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) |
| It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on. | Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) |
| It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is. | Jack Lemmon (1925-2001) |
| Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent. | James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987) |
| Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober. | James Thurber (1894-1961) |
| I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks. | Janet Flanner (1892-1978) |
| I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it. | Janet Flanner (1892-1978) |
| It requires more than mere genius to be an author. | Jean de la Bruyère (1645-1696) |
| He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line. | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) |
| The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything. | John Irving (1942-) |
| Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. | John Irving (1942-) |
| You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. | John Irving (1942-) |
| I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print. | John Mortimer |
| The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt. | John Mortimer |
| Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs | John Osborne (1929-1994) |
| Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying. | John Updike (1932-) |
| Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.. | Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) |
| Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul. | Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) |
| Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader. | Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) |
| There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together. | Josh Billings (1818-1885) |
| If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached. | Miss (Judith Martin) Manners (1938-) |
| Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins. | Jules Renard (1864-1910) |
| Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. | Jules Renard (1864-1910) |
| All sorrows can be borne if you tell a story about them. | Karen Blixen (1885-1962) |
| A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. | Karl Kraus (1874-1936) |
| The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it. | Karl Marx mamma (1818-1883) |
| I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction. | Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) |
| If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing. | Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) |
| I just wrote a book, but don't go out and buy it yet, because I don't think it's finished yet. | Lawrence Welk (1903-1992) |
| A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul. | Count Leo Lev Nikolgevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) |
| How will I know what I think until I see what I write? | Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) |
| The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal. | Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) |
| The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. | Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) |
| What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers. | Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) |
| To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all | Lord Byron (1788-1824) |
| Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use. | Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
| Only presidents, editors and people with tapeworm have the right to use the editorial 'we.' | Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
| The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. | Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
| Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for. | Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
| Don't wait for inspiration. Work inspires inspiration. If you succeed, keep working. If you fail, keep working. If you're interested, keep working. If you're bored, keep working. It works. | Michael Crichton (1942-) |
| All the world knows me in my book, and may book in me. | Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) |
| Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery. | Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) |
| Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money. | Molière (1622-1673) |
| Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman. | Nancy Banks Smith |
| Easy reading is damned hard writing. | Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) |
| Writing is the hardest way of earning of living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators. | Olin Miller |
| How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper. | Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) |
| Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure. | Oliver Herford (1863-1935) |
| Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging. | Patrick Dennis |
| Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting. | Pete Hamill (1935-) |
| Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, for it is a dangerous and a contagious disease. | Peter Abelard |
| I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork. | Peter de Vries (1910-1993) |
| I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't. | Phillip Roth (1933-) |
| We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen. | Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) |
| People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad. | Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) |
| They lard their lean books with the fat of others work. | Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) |
| I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. | Richard Wright (1908-1960) |
| A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. | Ring Lardner (1885-1933) |
| Never insult anyone by accident. | Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) |
| Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. | Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) |
| The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps. | Robert Benchley (1889-1945) |
| A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword. | Robert Burton (1577-1640) |
| I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it | Salman Rushdie (1947-) |
| Here I am paying big money to you writers and what for? All you do is change the words. | Samuel Goldwyn (1882-1974) |
| The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. | Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) |
| Poetry: the best words in the best order. | Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) |
| If I could think, maybe I wouldn't write. | Scott Spencer |
| Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for | Isocrates |
| Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itselfit is the occurring which is difficult. | Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) |
| In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style. | Sydney Smith (1771-1845) |
| Some editors are failed writers, but then, so are most writers. | T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) |
| A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. | Thomas Mann (1875-1955) |
| An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates. | Thomas Mann (1875-1955) |
| I never wanted to grow up to be a writer. I just wanted to grow up to be an adult. | Toni Morrison (1931-) |
| If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. | Toni Morrison (1931-) |
| The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.Toni Morrison | Toni Morrison (1931-) |
| A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations | Umberto Eco (1932-) |
| Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death. | Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) |
| To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. | Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) |
| Caress the detail, the divine detail. | Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) |
| You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. | Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) |
| Only a mediocre writer is always at his best. | William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) |
| The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties. | William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) |
| No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted. | Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) |
| Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders. | Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) |
| Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly every day. | William Allingham (1824-1889) |
| I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it. | William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) |
| A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction. | William Faulkner (1897-1962) |
| I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it. | William Faulkner (1897-1962) |
| The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it. | William Golding (1911-1993) |
| Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. | William Wordsworth (1770-1850) |
| One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds. | Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) |
| Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one's first productions. | André Maurois (1885-1967) |
| Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble | Arab Proverb |
| Authorship, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, is an infancy, a pastime, a labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, or a virtue | August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845) |
| Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. | Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) |
| Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are. | Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) |
| I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on. | Beryl Pfizer |
| Whether or not you write well, write bravely | Bill Stout (1927-) |
| Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him | Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) |
| Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. | Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897-1973) |
| That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time | Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832) |
| Metaphorically these essays move as a quiet but observant coast-guard cutter among the rocks and islands up and down the littoral of our life. | David McCord (1897-1997) |
| Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled. | Dean Koontz (1945-) |
| If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average | Derek Walcott (1930-) |
| She realized as a girl of eight that if she sat down and wrote her stories, she could escape the parts of life she didn't like, embroider the parts she did and thus control the life she had. | Dudley Clendinen |
| Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. | E. L. Doctorow (1931-) |
| Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. | E. L. Doctorow (1931-) |
| Writing is like carrying a fetus. | Edna O'Brien (1932-) |
| The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. | Elias Canetti (1905-1994) |
| My compositions deserve the medal, not me. | Elliot T. Carter |
| When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence. | Gao Xingjian (1940-) |
| Writing eases my suffering... writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence. | Gao Xingjian (1940-) |
| Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature. | Gao Xingjian (1940-) |
| Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. | Gene Fowler (1890-1960) |
| Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness | Georges Simenon (1903-) |
| The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people | George Dennison Prentice (1802-1870) |
| The mystery of writing advertisements consists mainly in saying in a few plain words exactly what it is desired to say, precisely as it would be written in a letter or told to an acquaintance. | George P. Rowell |
| Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude. | George V. Higgins (1939-1999) |
| To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write | Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) |
| Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. | Gloria Steinem (1935-) |
| Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in a human condition | Graham Greene (1904-1991) |
| I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces. | Harold Ross (1892-1951) |
| Sometimes he advertises himself assiduously, writing a few words and then rushing to the talk show to wave his flag. | Herbert Gold |
| If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write. | Hugh Prather |
| The waste basket is the writer's best friend. | Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) |
| Write what should not be forgotten | Isabel Allende (1942-) |
| Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. | Ivana Trump (1949-) |
| Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else. | Ivern Ball |
| Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it. | J. G. Ballard (1930-) |
| Writing is turning one's worst moments into money. | J. P. Donleavy (1926-) |
| It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is. | Jack Lemon |
| I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. | James A. Michener (1907-) |
| A mediocre mind thinks it writes divinely; a good mind thinks it writes reasonably | Jean de la Bruyère (1645-1696) |
| Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary. | Jessamyn West (1902-1984) |
| Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking. | Jessamyn West (1902-1984) |
| I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. | Joan Didion (1934-) |
| If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works. | John Dos Passos (1896-1970) |
| Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe. | John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003) |
| Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie. | John LeCarre (1931-) |
| Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs | John Osborne (1929-1994) |
| I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn't something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente. | John Sayles (1950-) |
| Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying | John Updike (1932-) |
| Writing is nothing more than a guided dream. | Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) |
| Every writer I know has trouble writing. | Joseph Heller (1923-1999) |
| Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram. | Lance Morrow (1939-) |
| Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation | Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) |
| Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow... | Lawrence Clark Powell |
| What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can't reread a phone call. | Liz Carpenter (1920-) |
| When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one. | M. F. K. Fisher |
| When I say "work" I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs. | Margaret Laurence |
| Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories. | Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-) |
| You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them. | Maurice Sendak (1928-) |
| I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift. | Mavis Gallant |
| Only the hand that erases can write the true thing. | Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) |
| Writing is the most demanding of callings, more harrowing than a warrior's, more lonely than a whaling captain's-that, in essence, is the modern writer's message. | Melvin Maddocks |
| I don't like to write, but I love to have written | Michael Kanin (1910-) |
| When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools. | Michael Leboeuf |
| If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes. | Mickey Spillane (1918-) |
| The pen is the tongue of the mind. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) |
| Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money. | Molière (1622-1673) |
| Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. | Nadine Gordimer (1923-) |
| Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of meditation- an investigation of my own life. It has nothing to do with "I've got to get another play | Neil Simon (1927-) |
| Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it | Octavia Butler |
| Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators. | Olin Miller |
| I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit. | P. G. Wodehouse (1881-) |
| Writing is like this-you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth. | Paul Engle (1908-1991) |
| I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes... | Philip Dusenberry |
| I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think? | Philip Larkin (1922-1985) |
| Whoever is able to write a book and does not, it is as if he has lost a child | Rabbi Nachman |
| The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. | Ralph Ellison (1914-) |
| The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way. | Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) |
| The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play. | Robert Anderson (1861-1939) |
| To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool. | Robert E Sherwood |
| It is hard to write about politicians, see them at such close range, and still think of any of them as heroes. | Robert Novakin |
| A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage. | Robert S. McNamara |
| The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.' | Roy Blount, Jr. (1941-) |
| Every piece of writing... starts from what I call a grit... a sight or sound, a sentence or happening that does not pass away... but quite inexplicably lodges in the mind. | Rumer Godden (1907-) |
| A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. | Samuel McChord Crothers |
| I lived to write, and wrote to live | Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) |
| A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man | Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) |
| You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. | Saul Bellow (1915-2005) |
| Writing is very much a playground; an artistic playground. It's the most fun thing I do. | Shania Twain (1965-) |
| Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. | Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) |
| Writing is a job. A drunk writer is about as useful as a drunk surgeon. You can spend the rest of the day swimming in booze, but the hours you write should be sober and with purpose. | Steve Gilliard |
| I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law | Taslima Nasrin |
| The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish. | Terry Southern (1924-) |
| Editing Hemingway was like wrestling with a god. | Tom Jenks |
| To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make. | Truman Capote (1924-1984) |
| I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find. | Wilfrid Sheed (1930-) |
| The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis. | William Styron (1925-) |
| Writing is thinking on paper. | William Zinsser |
| Writing is a craft not an art. | William Zinsser |
| To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art. | Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) |
| I don't believe a committee can write a book. It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps, but I don't believe it can write a book. | Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) |
| If I blow my nose, it gets written all over the world. | Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) |
| I write constantly, but only in my journals. I have three of them: one for travel, one for home, and one I write in before bed. But the last thing I want is other people reading it..... What's really fun is reading your journal, like a year later, or | Cameron Diaz (1972-) |
| I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like. | Coco Chanel (1883-1971) |
| I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early. | Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-) |
| The desire to write grows with writing. | Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536) |
| I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat. | Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) |
| Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors. | Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977) |
| 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 (1928-) |
| I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am. | Erica Jong (1942-) |
| Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. | Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) |
| There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges. | Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) |
| Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations. | Eudora Welty (1909-2001) |
| Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary. | F. Sagan |
| He writes so well he makes me feel like putting the quill back in the goose | Fred Allen (1894-1956) |
| For me, writing [was] a question of survival...I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in. | Gao Xingjian (1940-) |
| Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling, and good expression; it is having wit, soul, and taste, all together | George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-) |
| Every artist writes his own autobiography. | Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) |
| Heavens, no! It could get subpoenaed. I can't write anything. | Hillary Clinton (1947-2001) |
| I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images. | Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982) |
| My uncle out in Texas Can't even write his name He signs his checks with Xs But they cash 'em just the same | Irving Berlin (1888-1989) |
| We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children. | Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) |
| I wrote a thousand words every day | Jack London (1876-1916) |
| There are three-hundred thousand sportswriters and they're all against me. Every one of them. | Joaquin Andujar |
| But when the pen is in his hand he has to write by itch and twitch, though certainly his itch and twitch are intimately conditioned by all his past itching and twitching, and by all his past theorizing about them. | John Ciardi (1916-1986) |
| How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability. | John Updike (1932-) |
| Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. | Jules Renard (1864-1910) |
| I'm a sensitive guy. If you are a woman and you're in any kind of emotional duress and you write a song about it, I'll buy you album. | Matthew Perry (1969-) |
| I felt like writing about a time when I was probably, and I think all of us are, the happiest in our lives-before the obligations start in. | Neil Simon (1927-) |
| In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write. | Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) |
| I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning | Peter de Vries (1910-1993) |
| 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 (1920-) |
| You write with ease to show your breeding, but easy writing's curst hard reading | Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) |
| The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the opportunity. | Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994) |
| The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish. | Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) |
| Writing only leads to more writing. | Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) |
| In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style. | Sydney Smith (1771-1845) |
| Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself. | Terry Pratchett (1948-) |
| Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness. | Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) |
| Write on my gravestone: "Infidel, Traitor.", infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people. | Wendell Phillips (1811-1884) |
| Writing is the supreme solace. | William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) |
| The writer's duty is to keep on writing | William Styron (1925-) |
| Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. | Gloria Steinem (1935-) |
| Writing is thinking on paper. | William Zinsser |
| When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence. | Gao Xingjian (1940-) |
| You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. | Saul Bellow (1915-2005) |
| You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say. | Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) |
| Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it | Octavia Butler |
| She realized as a girl of eight that if she sat down and wrote her stories, she could escape the parts of life she didn't like, embroider the parts she did and thus control the life she had. | Dudley Clendinen |
| Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon. | Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) |
| It is all very well to be able to write books, but can you waggle your ears? | James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) |
| Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. | Gene Fowler (1890-1960) |
| Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for. | Ray Bradbury (1920-) |
| Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble. | Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) |
| Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money. | Molière (1622-1673) |
| Whether or not you write well, write bravely | Bill Stout (1927-) |
| I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. | James A. Michener (1907-) |
| Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled. | Dean Koontz (1945-) |
| Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. | Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) |
| The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis. | William Styron (1925-) |
| I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on. | Beryl Pfizer |
| Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. | Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) |
| The two most beautiful words in the English language are "Check enclosed". | Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) |
| I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have religious training. And I suppose you don't say, "I'm going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal, but of course it does. | Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) |
| I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, "You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy. I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?" And I really, really don't. | Aaron Sorkin (1961-) |
| Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright. | Aaron Sorkin (1961-) |
| I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties. | Agatha Christie (1890-1976) |
| Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators. | Albert Camus (1913-1960) |
| One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds. | Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) |
| If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. | Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) |
| Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere . . .You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away. | Anne Lamott (1954-) |
| I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living. | Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) |
| I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them. | Anne Rice (1941-) |
| My pen is my razor, and I've been bleeding. | Anthony Beal |
| I don't believe a committee can write a book. It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps, but I don't believe it can write a book. | Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) |
| Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from. | Arthur Miller (1915-2005) |
| Writing a book is not as tough as it is to haul thirty-five people around the country and sweat like a horse five nights a week. | Bette Midler (1945-) |
| The more we write the less we die. | Brian Kessler (1970-) |
| Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years. | Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) |
| People ask me when I start one of these projects, what is your theme? I haven’t the faintest idea. That’s why you’re writing the book, it seems to me, to find out. To me, it’s a journey. It’s an adventure. It’s traveling in a country you’ve never been in and everything is going to be new, and because of that, vivid. And don’t make up your mind too soon. Let it be an experience. | David McCullough |
| Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical. | Derrick Jensen |
| Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals. | Don Delillo (1936-) |
| If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you. | Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) |
| Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. | E. L. Doctorow (1931-) |
| Writing is like carrying a fetus. | Edna O'Brien (1932-) |
| The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. | Edwin Schlossberg |
| I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am. | Erica Jong (1942-) |
| Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work a | Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) |
| I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- | Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) |
| 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) |
| I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it. | Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) |
| For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can. | Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) |
| All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time. | Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) |
| The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention | Ezra Pound (1885-1972) |
| An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards. | F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) |
| Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. | Francis Bacon, Sr. (1561-1626) |
| Critics don't bother me because if I do badly, I know I'm bad before they even write it. And if I'm good, I know I'm good. I know best about myself, so a critic doesn't anger me. | Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) |
| Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward | Franz Kafka (1883-1924) |
| Write injuries in sand, kindnesses in marble | French Proverb |
| Only the fact that people have written about the reissue have I realized that it spent seven weeks at No. 1. At the time I did it, I can't remember even taking any notice of it. | George Harrison (1943-2001) |
| Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger... To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing. | Gloria Anzaldua |
| Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living. | Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) |
| She writes like a loom, producing her broad rich fabric with hardly a thought of how it will make up into a shape, while I write to cover a frame of ideas. | H. G. Wells (1866-1946) |
| Perhaps what I do not manage to operate rapidly enough is the passage between the outside and the inside. | Helene Cixous |
| I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me. | Henri Matisse (1869-1954) |
| Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious | Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) |
| To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it. | Herman Melville (1819-1891) |
| You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers. | George Horace Lorimer (1867-1937) |
| Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck. | Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) |
| The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. | Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) |
| I always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college... I did other things. | Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994) |
| I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. | Joan Didion (1934-) |
| If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own. | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) |
| Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe. | John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003) |
| Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish. | John Jakes |
| When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. | John Updike (1932-) |
| Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is. | Jose Saramago (1922-) |
| I love to write. I love it. I mean there's nothin in the world I like better, and that includes sex, probably because I'm so very bad at it. | Joss Whedon (1964-) |
| Women with clean houses do not have finished books. | Joy Held |
| Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all. | Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) |
| I have learned that it is far easier to write a speech about good advertising than it is to write a good ad. | Leo Burnett (1891-1971) |
| It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice | Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) |
| I know what I should love to do--to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing--one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not. | General Lew Wallace (1827-1905) |
| If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves. | Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) |
| What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can't reread a phone call. | Liz Carpenter (1920-) |
| I'll publish, right or wrong: / Fools are my theme, let satire be my song. | Lord Byron (1788-1824) |
| As to 'Don Juan,' confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? | Lord Byron (1788-1824) |
| If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. | Lord Byron (1788-1824) |
| Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals | Marcel Proust (1871-1922) |
| In all my writings my aim has been to spare sinners and assail sin | Marcus Aurelius Antonius (121-180) |
| Write without pay until somebody offers to pay | Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
| There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word. | Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) |
| In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by disc | Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) |
| The only good histories are those that have been written by the persons themselves who commanded in the affairs whereof they write | Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) |
| Writing is the indelible fingerprint of my soul on paper. | Michelle L. Buckley |
| If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes. | Mickey Spillane (1918-) |
| This is the image from which he was born...... Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility......the characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them and equally horrified by them...... | Milan Kundera (1929-) |
| I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others | Molière (1622-1673) |
| Easy reading is damned hard writing. | Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) |
| Somebody would say, `Can you write us an article about big, bodice-ripping, blockbusting romance novels?' And I'd say, `Yes, of course,' because I was a hungry young journalist. | Neil Gaiman (1960-) |
| Writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader's mind, or miss it - but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you can't help hitting it | Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) |
| I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about. | Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) |
| In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write. | Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) |
| A notebook can be a clearing in the forest of your life, a place where you can be alone and content asyou play with outrage and wonder, details and gossip, language and dreams, plots and subplots, perceptions and small epiphanies. | Ralph Fletcher |
| Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise. | Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) |
| The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought | Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) |
| 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 (1920-) |
| Writers will happen in the best of families. | Rita Mae Brown (1944-) |
| Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. | Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) |
| The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play. | Robert Anderson (1861-1939) |
| Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second. | Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
| Written reports stifle creativity. | H. Ross Perot (1930-) |
| I lived to write, and wrote to live | Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) |
| Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica. | Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) |
| Not write what you know, but know what you write. If you write about a world before, after, or other than this one, enter that world completely. Search it to find your deepest longings and most terrible fears. Let imagination carry you as far as it may, as long as you recount the voyage with excitement and wonder. But this is the most important rule: write the book you most long to read. | Steven Saylor |
| It isn't writing at all - it's typing | Truman Capote (1924-1984) |
| Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down. | Truman Capote (1924-1984) |
| When I think about how good my book could be, I can hardly breathe. | Truman Capote (1924-1984) |
| Before I write I let my mind go blind and let the lord do his thing. | Tupac Shakur (1971-1996) |
| The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it. | Vanna Bonta |
| There are abundantly more English professors in the world than there are authors. | Vanna Bonta |
| The last motive in the world for acquiring vocabulary should be to impress. Words should be acquired because we urgently need them -- to convey, to reach, to express something within us, and to understand others. | Vanna Bonta |
| Language achieves soul only when it's applied as a tool, used by those who imbue it with what they have had the courage and honesty to perceive and feel. | Vanna Bonta |
| Words are contact with other beings. I see a word that says something I've noticed, seen, felt, obserevd, and I capture it; "I need that word!" | Vanna Bonta |
| I've been aware of death since I was a little girl. My only regret willl be not being able to write about it. | Vanna Bonta |
| You write in your letter something which I sometimes feel also: Sometimes I do not know how I shall pull through. | Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) |
| The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything. | Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) |
| The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything | Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) |
| A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction. | William Faulkner (1897-1962) |
| The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews. | William Faulkner (1897-1962) |
| The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too. | William Saroyan (1908-1981) |
| To write simply is as difficult as to be good | William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) |
| Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to | William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) |
| The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis. | William Styron (1925-) |
| Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. | Winston Churchill (1874-1965) |
| Å skrive er et spørsmål om å finne små nok ord til store nok følelser. | Hans Børli |
| De som kan noe, gjør det, - men det som ikke kan noe, og som har det tilstrekkelig vondt av den grunn, skriver om det. | William Faulkner (1897-1962) |
| En mann som skriver godt, skriver ikke som man skriver, men som han skriver. | Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689-1755) |
| Han ville aldri nøye seg med å overlate trykkeren en middelmådig setning. | Albert Camus (1913-1960) |
| Jeg er som en dårlig blyant, man må spisse meg nesten helt opp, før jeg kan skrive. | Olaf Bull |
| Jeg skriver når jeg er inspirert, og jeg sørger for å være inspirert klokken ni hver morgen. | Peter de Vries (1910-1993) |
| Jeg trekker fra og juger. Det er en dikters plikter. | Arild Nyquist (1937-) |
| Jeg tror jeg kan skrive rent og klart nå, for jeg kjenner virkelig ikke mer til vrede. I hvert fall ikke til hat. | Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) |
| Plutselig faller det meg inn en eller to gode setninger til bruk for en skisse, en føljetong, fine språklige lykketreff som jeg aldri hadde funnet make til. | Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) |
| Skrivekunst er ganske enkelt forfatteren og leseren i hver sin ende av blyanten. Så nær hverandre skal de være. | Jay R. Gould |
| Titt forbauser mine skikkelser meg ved å gjøre eller si ting jeg ikke hadde ventet av dem, ja, de kan undertiden vende opp ned på mine planer, de sataner. | Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) |