Quotes About Writing

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.

You cannot write in the chimney with charcoal.

I can write better than anyone who can write faster, and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written ... she is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in them but now they seem hardly to belong to her - and probably she is involved with another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

That's not writing, that's typing.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed in keeping rabbits.

The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself- it is the occurring which is difficult.

Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

Caesar had perished from the world of men Had not his sword been rescued by his pen.

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

Get black on white.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do with it.

It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.