Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Authors & Writing.
He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.
Johann von Goethe
Remember to never split an infinitive.The passive voice should never be used.Do not put statements in the negative form.Verbs have to agree with their subjects.Proofread carefully to see if you words out.If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.A writer must not shift your point of view.And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)Don't overuse exclamation marks!!Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.Always pick on the correct idiom.The adverb always follows the verb.Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.
William Safire, William Safire's
It isn't easy, it does take an incredible amount of discipline, you don't just write just when you feel like it or you're not going to build up much of a body of work. Inspiration comes to you while you're writing rather than before....For me the discipline of writing and the discipline of prayer are identical, in that I have to let myself be got out of the way because that's not a do-it-yourself activity, and listen....When you write, don't think, write. You think before, you think after, you don't think during. When I'm praying, when I'm truly praying, I'm not thinking, I'm not speaking, I'm shutting up, so perhaps if God has something to say I can hear it. So writing too is an act of listening, listening to what has to be said.
Madeleine L'Engle, Perkins Lectu
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
We all start out with the same alphabet. We are all unique. Talent is not the most important thing --- discipline and dedication are. Craft can be learned but desire and longing are innate. Despite the demands of school and just being young, try to write SOMETHING every day --- a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice. Everything is possible in this world of ours--- and so's publication.
Robert Cormier, answering the qu
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks if I knew he could hear me. Praised may he be for not creating me a cotton merchant, a vaudevillian, or a wit.
Gustave Flaubert
To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.
Truman Capote
The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.
John Farrar
To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism, to steal ideas from many is research.
Anon.
Some authors should be paid by the quantity NOT written.
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
Vladimir Nabokov
The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.
Horace
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.
You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.
Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.
One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.
A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
Marianne Moore
Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word.
Gail Hamilton
I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.
Sir Peter Hall
