Quotes About Writing

Grubstreet—The name of a street near Moorsfield, London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.

An old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.

It is indeed certain, that whoever attempts any common topick, will find unexpected coincidences of his thoughts with those of other writers; nor can the nicest judgment always distinguish accidental similitude from artful imitation.

ESSAY -- A loose sally of the mind an irregular indigested piece not a regular and orderly composition.

No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, nor more wise when he had.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

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 way you can.

to my office till very late, and my eyes began to fail me, and be in pain which I never felt to now-a-days, which I impute to sitting up late writing and reading by candle-light.

What I write [. . .] doesn't seem to be . . . true. I mean I can model so little of what it's about. Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses. In my loft, alone, in the middle of the night, it comes blaring in. So I work at culling enough from it to construct moments of order.

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn't.

That seemed to be, if anything, the power of writing—to hold sway over memory, making it public, keeping it private, possibly, even, keeping it secret from oneself—

The sad truth is, S—, most people are not writers. This has nothing to do with literacy—or intelligence, or general culture. There are people who can correct the grammar, spelling, diction, and style of a college English paper with the best of them—who are still not writers. Indeed, most of what gets published in books, magazines, and newspapers is not written by real writers—which is one reason why so much of it is so bad.

Sometimes I cannot tell who wrote what. That is upsetting. With some sections, I can remember the place and time I wrote them, but have no memory of the incidents described. Similarly, other sections refer to things I recall happening to me, but kne/o/w just as well I never wrote out. Then there are pages that, today, I interpret one way with the clear recollection of having interpreted them another at the last rereading.

I'd managed to type more than two hundred consecutive pages about more or less the same characters who stayed more or less in the same place and more or less took part in the same story.

It is not that female characters in the modern novel are characterizations of bad or limited people—although, incidentally, they almost always are—but that they are badly drawn, because the writers flatly refuse to apply the same complex of literary artifice in their character realizations to both males and females—out of habits that begin as a response to some terror that human individuation would make the female characters equal to the males.

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind---vividly, forcefully...

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.

Never pursue literature as a trade.

You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.

I think my family and closest friends are learning about my need to withdraw, and I am learning how to restore and store my energy to both serve the community to the best of my ability and to serve my writer's heart.