Quotes About Writing

A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo.'

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Clarity is the politeness of the man of letters.

Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.

We writers have this saying 'Kill your darlings'... but I suppose you family men don't agree with it.

Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.

I didn't choose to write a military man as much as Vince Haven chose me.

But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.

They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

It has been said that to write is to live forever. The man who said that is dead.

Writing is all a lottery -- I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age.

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

The more a man writes, the more he can write.

The feather, whence the pen Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men, Dropped from an angel's wing.

The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.

Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.

The only reason people write is because they are not wonderful men.

A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.

The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every one save the man of absolute genius.

In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.

I have known many an instance of a man writing a letter and forgetting to sign his name, but this is the only instance I have ever known of a man signing his name and forgetting to write the letter.

Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.