Quotes About Writing

Every good thing we know would be lost to darkness, all unremembered, if each had not been preserved for us by some sinner with a pen.

Now that reading and writing are universal accomplishments, books are not bought so freely as they were about 1820. . . . [I]n fact, book-buying does not increase in proportion with the power of reading printed matter. People prefer periodical trash, snippets of twaddle. [February 1894, editor's introduction to Dana Estes & Company's The Betrothed, by Sir Walter Scott]

It's a terrible mistake to let the perfect get in the way of the good. If you wait to publish until you have written a great book, you will never publish anything. Great books happen by chance, not by design. The wise writer writes the best he can and leaves it to posterity to decide about greatness.

Priests of religion. Large-scale building projects. Writing. Taxes. Soldiers. Kings. The ability to make war. All arrive in human history alongside one another, based on the first cities, which are really the first concentrations of stored wealth, themselves based on riverside farming cultures that needed to work together to tame nature.

Unfortunately I'm one of those people who writes better when they're unhappy.

Julia's defining quality, maybe, was her combination of outer normality, even placidity, and a roiling, crazily volatile inner life that expressed itself mainly in her writing.

If you're Stephen King and you realized halfway through you've created far too many plot lines; you arbitrarily murder a few in the middle of the book. If you're George RR Martin; well, you just keep writing more books and murder them at your leisure.

CARLY PHILLIPS There is no substitute for hard work, i.e., sitting down at the computer and writing no matter what you feel like doing instead.

Because there was no pre-existing patrician elite, those successful in the new book industry could write very swiftly to the top of the social hierarchy.

If an English writer cannot say what he has to say in English, and in simple English, depend upon it, it is probably not worth saying

journalism is the first draft of history

It is said that most first novels are at least partly autobiographical

Churchill's written output was similarly immense. He published 6.1 million words in thirty-seven books – more than Shakespeare and Dickens combined – and delivered five million in public speeches, not counting his voluminous letter- and memorandum-writing.

Roberts is an uncommonly gifted writer, capable of synthesizing vast amounts of material and rendering it in clear, elegant prose.

Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.

Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

The idea that you're not a writer until you're published is a lie.

Everything has been, everything has happened. And everything has already been written about. Vysogota of Corvo

The priceless writing from the Dark Ages burned with a tall, bright flame. For a few short moments the centuries spoke with the soft whisper of paper blackening in the fire. And then the flame went out and darkness covered the earth.

We believe that the major benefits of testing happen when you think about and write the tests, not when you run them.

Writing is hard . That's why so few people stick to it and actually finish things. And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you finish something." [ There Is No Such Thing as Writers' Block : Blog post, October 7, 2001]

A writer's job is to tell the truth.

I am not retiring. Writers don't retire. Writers never stop writing.