Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with On Writing.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
Brian Kernighan
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
Ernest Hemingway
Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
Stephen King
Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.
Mark Twain
Your writing is never as good as you hoped; but never as bad as you feared.
Bertrand Russell
I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing.
Neil Gaiman
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.
Grammar is...the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
Albert Camus
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.