- “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
- “Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow...” – Lawrence Clark Powell
- “Write without pay until somebody offers to pay”—Mark Twain
- “Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else.”—Ivern Ball
- “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.”
- “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
- “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 easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”—Gene Fowler
- “If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.”—Lord Byron
- “I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes...”—Philip Dunsenberry
- “If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.”—Hugh Prather
- “Perfectionism is slow death”—Hugh Prather
- “It is all very well to be able to write books, but can you waggle your ears?”—James Matthew Barrie
- “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
- “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
- “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”—Saul Bellow
- “I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning”—Peter de Vries
- “I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.”—Edgar Allen Poe
- “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
- “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
- “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 Hemmingway
- “You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.”—Maurice Sendak
- “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 Hemmingway
- “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 Hemmingway
- “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
- “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 Emmerson
- “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
- “No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one”—Robert Byrne
- “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
- “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.”—HG Wells
- “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 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
- “Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth... But amusing? Never.”--Unknown
- “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”—Dr Seuss
- “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”—Margaret Fuller
- “We read to know we are not alone.”—CS Lewis
- “A home without books is a body without soul.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero
- “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”—Victor Hugo
dec 8 2010 ∞
dec 8 2010 +
dec 8 2010 +