Quotes About Writing

The cat language is very complex," Shawn said. "If a cat had written the Harry Potter books, he could have gotten through the whole thing in fifteen pages, tops. And he would still have found the space to mention

Passionless is vulgar ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")

I have associated myself with failed scientists in order to associate myself with failed irony. ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")

Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't. Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed.... Avoid commas, that are not necessary.... And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.... If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is...

Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. And don't start a sentence with a conjugation.

A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

Here are a few of the unpleasant'st wordsThat ever blotted paper.

Let there be gall enough in thy ink.

Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio.

Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.

The only people who stay the same are minuscule talents who earn their livings writing about other people who are busy living real lives

There's an old saying that great writing is simple but not easy, and so it is. The search for that one plain but inobvious [SIC] word that will do the work of five, the agony of untangling a complex idea that has become a mess of phrases in the writer's mind, the willingness to keep doing it over and over again until it is right--all of that plus some luck yields prose so clear that it seems a child could have written it.

To do it artificially, to try to hype myself into being a better writer by doggedly reading better literature, is also a mistake. I learn to use the language by the pleasures it gives me when I am able to swim in it or maneuver in it or interchange in it with the people around me.

If you find it difficult to write, lower your standards.

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can't write unless you read.

As a writer one doesn't belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn't belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.