There Is Nothing To Write About, You Say. Well Then, Write And Let Me Know Just This – That There Is Nothing To Write About; Or Tell Me In The Good Old Style If You Are Well. That’s Right. I Am Quite Well.
- Pliny the Younger
It’s Very Important That We Start Creating New Content Again. We Can Only Build On Nostalgia So Much Before We Have Nothing Left To Build On.
- Joss Whedon
First You’re An Unknown, Then You Write One Book And You Move Up To Obscurity.
- Martin Myers
Typos Are Very Important To All Written Form. It Gives The Reader Something To Look For So They Aren’t Distracted By The Total Lack Of Content In Your Writing.
- Randy K. Milholland
Any Word You Have To Hunt For In A Thesaurus Is The Wrong Word. There Are No Exceptions To This Rule.
- Stephen King
I Don’t Think Anyone Should Write Their Autobiography Until After They’re Dead.
- Samuel Goldwyn
An Author Is A Fool Who, Not Content With Boring Those He Lives With, Insists On Boring Future Generations.
- Charles de Montesquieu
Reading Maketh A Full Man, Conference A Ready Man, And Writing An Exact Man.
- Sir Francis Bacon
I Have Made This [Letter] Longer, Because I Have Not Had The Time To Make It Shorter.
- Blaise Pascal
Writing Is The Only Profession Where No One Considers You Ridiculous If You Earn No Money.
- Jules Renard
I’ve Always Believed In Writing Without A Collaborator, Because Where Two People Are Writing The Same Book, Each Believes He Gets All The Worries And Only Half The Royalties.
- Agatha Christie
Don’t Use Words Too Big For The Subject. Don’t Say ‘Infinitely’ When You Mean ‘Very’; Otherwise You’ll Have No Word Left When You Want To Talk About Something Really Infinite.
- C. S. Lewis
Good Writing Takes More Than Just Time; It Wants Your Best Moments And The Best Of You.
- Gordon Atkinson
Be Generous, Be Delicate, And Always Pursue The Prize.
- Henry James
You Must Keep Sending Work Out; You Must Never Let A Manuscript Do Nothing But Eat Its Head Off In A Drawer. You Send That Work Out Again And Again, While You’re Working On Another One. If You Have Talent, You Will Receive Some Measure Of Success – But Only If You Persist.
- Isaac Asimov
Vigorous Writing Is Concise.
- William Strunk Jr.
If A Writer Wrote Merely For His Time, I Would Have To Break My Pen And Throw It Away.
- Victor Hugo
How Vain It Is To Sit Down To Write When You Have Not Stood Up To Live.
- Henry David Thoreau
I Love Being A Writer. What I Can’t Stand Is The Paperwork.
- Peter De Vries
It’s Not About The Writing. It’s About The Feelings Behind The Words.
- Unknown
There’s Always Something To Write About. If There’s Not Then You Need To Live Life More Aggressively.
- Min Kim
A Classic Is Classic Not Because It Conforms To Certain Structural Rules, Or Fits Certain Definitions (Of Which Its Author Had Quite Probably Never Heard). It Is Classic Because Of A Certain Eternal And Irrepressible Freshness.
- Edith Wharton
There Is Only One Way To Defeat The Enemy, And That Is To Write As Well As One Can. The Best Argument Is An Undeniably Good Book.
- Saul Bellow
You Have To Know How To Accept Rejection And Reject Acceptance.
- Ray Bradbury
Politics Is Not A Bad Profession. If You Succeed There Are Many Rewards, If You Disgrace Yourself You Can Always Write A Book.
- Ronald Reagan
Unprovided With Original Learning, Unformed In The Habits Of Thinking, Unskilled In The Arts Of Composition, I Resolved To Write A Book.
- Edward Gibbon
Your Manuscript Is Both Good And Original, But The Part That Is Good Is Not Original And The Part That Is Original Is Not Good.
- Samuel Johnson
An Author Spends Months Writing A Book, And Maybe Puts His Heart’s Blood Into It, And Then It Lies About Unread Till The Reader Has Nothing Else In The World To Do.
- W. Somerset Maugham
Advice To Writers: Sometimes You Just Have To Stop Writing. Even Before You Begin.
- Stanislaw J. Lec
I Was Working On The Proof Of One Of My Poems All The Morning, And Took Out A Comma. In The Afternoon I Put It Back Again.
- Oscar Wilde
You Can Approach The Act Of Writing With Nervousness, Excitement, Hopefulness, Or Even Despair?The Sense That You Can Never Completely Put On The Page What’s In Your Mind And Heart. You Can Come To The Act With Your Fists Clenched And Your Eyes Narrowed, Ready To Kick Ass And Take Down Names. You Can Come To It Because You Want A Girl To Marry You Or Because You Want To Change The World. Come To It Any Way But Lightly. Let Me Say It Again: You Must Not Come Lightly To The Blank Page.
In Certain Kinds Of Writing, Particularly In Art Criticism And Literary Criticism, It Is Normal To Come Across Long Passages Which Are Almost Completely Lacking In Meaning.
- George Orwell
Sometimes, When It’s Going Badly, She Wonders If What She Believes To Be A Love Of The Written Word Is Really Just A Fetish For Stationary. The True Writer, The Born Writer, Will Scribble Words On Scraps Of Litter, The Back Of A Bus Ticket, On The Wall Of A Cell.
- David Nicholls
Writing Is Not Necessarily Something To Be Ashamed Of, But Do It In Private And Wash Your Hands Afterwards.
- Robert Heinlein
The Man Who Writes About Himself And His Own Time Is The Only Man Who Writes About All People And All Time.
- George Bernard Shaw
Writing Gives You The Illusion Of Control, And Then You Realize It’s Just An Illusion, That People Are Going To Bring Their Own Stuff Into It.
- David Sedaris
The Most Difficult Part Of Writing A Book Is Not Devising A Plot Which Will Captivate The Reader. It’s Not Developing Characters The Reader Will Have Strong Feelings For Or Against. It Is Not Finding A Setting Which Will Take The Reader To A Place He Or She As Never Been. It Is Not The Research, Whether In Fiction Or Non-Fiction. The Most Difficult Task Facing A Writer Is To Find The Voice In Which To Tell The Story.
- Randy Pausch
Some Editors Are Failed Writers, But So Are Most Writers.
- T. S. Eliot
All Of Us Learn To Write In The Second Grade. Most Of Us Go On To Greater Things.
- Bobby Knight
Many Books Require No Thought From Those Who Read Them, And For A Very Simple Reason; They Made No Such Demand Upon Those Who Wrote Them.
- Charles Caleb Colton
Read Over Your Compositions, And Wherever You Meet With A Passage Which You Think Is Particularly Fine, Strike It Out.
Even Writers Need Relief From Words.
- Sarah Vowell
Stories Don’t Just Make Us Matter To Each Other; Maybe They’re Also The Only Way To The Infinite Mattering He’d Been After For So Long.
After Being Turned Down By Numerous Publishers, He Had Decided To Write For Posterity.
- George Ade
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
This Is The Challenge Of Writing. You Have To Be Very Emotionally Engaged In What You’re Doing, Or It Comes Out Flat. You Can’t Fake Your Way Through This.
I Am A Galley Slave To Pen And Ink.
- Honore de Balzac
The Tendinous Part Of The Mind, So To Speak, Is More Developed In Winter; The Fleshy, In Summer. I Should Say Winter Had Given The Bone And Sinew To Literature, Summer The Tissues And The Blood.
- John Burroughs
About The Most Originality That Any Writer Can Hope To Achieve Honestly Is To Steal With Good Judgment.
- Josh Billings
If You Don’t Have The Time To Read, You Don’t Have The Time Or The Tools To Write.
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