Quotes About Writing

Paper is patient.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.

For, truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen — that one must learn how to write?

"And when once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen." "But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any other way you can." "To be sure... I have seen a litherary gentleman in a sponging house do crack things on the wall, with a bit of burnt stick..."

Some Passages from a Journal That Was Never Kept

Ink smears, as thoughts sometimes do.

Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.

write, write or die.

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.

Writing is not a great profession as a lot of writers proclaim. I write because this is something I can do. Another thing—very often I think a lot of writers write because they have failed to do other things. How many writers can't drive? A lot. They're not practical. They are not capable in everyday life.

I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.

In the depths of my being I have never been one of them. I have just written what I experienced.

I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as a crystal.

The art of writing is not as solitary as one might think. When it finally dawns on us one day that our task as writers is to share what we know of the human spirit, we suddenly discover that we were never truly alone.

Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.

There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction. This may very well describe why we write memoir, for it is often in the delayed reaction, long after the actual living, that we can fully savor the fruits of our experience. [Foreword of Shimmering Images by Lisa Dale Norton]

When a young woman tells me that she wants to become and actor, I say, 'No, be a writer. Or go to business school and learn how to run a studio.' The only real change will come from behind the scenes.

How strange to write about "having" when for so long I've drawn inspiration only from longing?

They cry, "But I WANT to be a writer!" And my head hangs. You are asking to be shot square in the head. You know not what you seek. You ask for bleeding brains and carnage that stains your pillowcase. You ask for jelly in the place of the cartilage in your spine. You ask for kindness that is never returned. You wish to burn alive in the flame of a love unrequited. It's simple. Write.

You've been singing on your own all along Writing records in your room since 15 Drama queen Well you're older now it seems

The written English we want is clean, clear prose. I choose my words carefully – not elegant, not stylish, just clean, clear prose. It means simplifying, polishing and tightening.

Write so simply that any other officer who knows nothing of the subject can still understand you. To do this, avoid confusion and give words their ordinary meanings.

Gaiman wrote the first draft in fountain pen, in several five-hundred-page, leather-bound sketchbooks that he purchased in a close-out sale. "I really wanted a second draft," says the author. "It's my experience with computers that they do not give you a second draft. Computers give you an ongoing, ever-improving first draft.