Quotes about Writing by Famous Authors
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L’Engle
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain
“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.
Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
― William Wordsworth
“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.”
― Beatrix Potter
“Tears are words that need to be written.”
― Paulo Coelho
“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
― Neil Gaiman
“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
― Annie Proulx
“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
― Albert Camus
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
― Pablo Picasso
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
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“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell
“All I need is a sheet of paper
and something to write with, and then
I can turn the world upside down.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
― Stephen King
“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
― Ray Bradbury
“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it”
― Roald Dahl
“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”
― George Orwell
“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.”
― Aristotle
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”
― Richard Bach
“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