Quotes About Writing

Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

Practice safe text — use commas and never miss a period.

Two most important things in a writer's wallet: library card and poetic license.

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.

What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought!... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

A poet is too impatient for prose. He needs an expressway to his emotions.

Writing poetry is letting go— once the words leave your pen they're out of your soul and the therapy has begun.

A poet cannot stop writing poems — an ink-stained soul compels his obsession.

If you got to talking to most cowboys, they'd admit they write 'em. I think some of the meanest, toughest sons of bitches around write poetry.

If a poet writes in gibberish, his soul yet understands.

Inner thought: it is easier to make rhymes on a train; the lines come out the right length because the wheel clicks never miss their count. Idea: if we were a poet we would spend all our time on trains.

A poet rips his flesh on the thorn of language and bleeds raw ink onto paper petals.

It's easier to write poetry on a bad day, when your heart has been halved and emotions bleed out through the pen.

VERS LIBRE. A device for making poetry easier to write and harder to read.

A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciæ of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day.

To me, novels are just quotations with a bunch of filler.

He lik'd those literary cooks Who skim the cream of others' books; And ruin half an author's graces, By plucking bon-mots from their places...

Whenever the mind of a writer is saturated with the full inspiration of a great author, a quotation gives completeness to the whole; it seals his feelings with undisputed authority. Or whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords whose tones we are about to harmonise.

The only cure for writer's block is insomnia.

At 2:51 A.M. student engineer Tripp wrote in his log: "Night watchman Foersch reported to captain that he had just seen and smelled smoke coming out of one of the small ventilators on the port after side of the fiddley." The fiddley was a galvanized-iron duct supplying fresh air to the first-class writing room on B deck, among other rooms.

Solid-steel fire doors had been built into entrances to the public rooms to deal with just such an emergency. It would have taken Hackney only a few moments to isolate the writing room from the rest of B deck by lowering its fire door. Clarence Hackney did not take that preventive measure. Smoke billowed after him as he ran for the telephone near the door connecting the first-class lounge to the smoking room. He dialed the bridge.

But it was futile. Half a dozen hoses under full pressure would have been required to make an impact on the blaze enveloping the writing room. Even if fire crews had brought hoses to bear on the flames, it would have made little difference: the engine room was unable to provide sustained pressure because of the closed boiler.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.