Quotes About Writing

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

The successful writers continue to learn and grow in their craft—and also to grow their audience or tribe or platform.

No book or magazine article is for "everyone" so know your audience, then target them with your writing.

Hook your editor with a strong opening sentence to bring attention to your writing.

I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. ("The Adoration of The Magi")

if one writes one can do nothing else.

I praise but in brief words the noble writing of these books, for words that praise a book, wherein something is done supremely well, remain, to sound in the ears of a later generation, like the foolish sound of church bells from the tower of a church when every pew is full.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

If you want romance, fuck a journalist.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.

The underlying reason for writing is to bridge the gulf between one person and another.

Just as a good man forgets his deed the moment he has done it, a genuine writer forgets a work as soon as he has completed it and starts to think about the next one; if he thinks about his past work at all, he is more likely to remember its faults than its virtues. Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

When a reviewer describes a book as 'sincere,' one knows immediately that it is a) insincere (insincerely insincere) and b) badly written.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear.

I live. I write. I watch old movies. I read. I watch the sunset. I watch the moon rise.

you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write