Writing Quotes

Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Writing.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Books Man Writing

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will fin

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Happiness Talent Writing

And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland,

And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. (How to Write with Style. Essay, 1985)

Writer Style Writing Ireland Writers Quotes

I have spent a good many years since--too many, I think--bei

I have spent a good many years since--too many, I think--being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

Writing Writing Life Critics

All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, a

All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Writing

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficul

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced...

Ernest Hemingway

Writing

I my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son di

I my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I my hurt, and even it, a little, for now I could write a death, a loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled.

Writing Shakespeare

- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech wh

- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.- Never use a long word where a short one will do.- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.- Never use the passive where you can use the active.- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Writing Prose

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have min

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

Reading Writing Literature

To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that

To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: 'Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.' I do not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only to those who suffer from the disease which Mr Krutch diagnoses. I believe that, after some years of such an existence, the ex-intellectual will fin that in spite of is efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and when this time comes his writing will not seem to him futile.

Bertrand Russell

Advice Inspirational Writing Process Writing

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was n

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

Truth Creativity Fiction Writing Process Writing Fantasy

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

Art Writing Literature

Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise,

Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.

Writing

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; p

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Ernest Hemingway

People Character Writing

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

Writing

In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by

In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words.

Writing Leo Tolstoy

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I

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

Time Luck Writing Thetimes

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

Ernest Hemingway

Minimalism Writing Elaboration Hemingway Prose

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to wr

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Ernest Hemingway

Business Writing

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bot

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of 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. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

Books Writing Literature Writing Craft