Quotes About Writing

Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense

I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others need no preparation and got none.

When all else fails, write what your heart tells you. You can't depend on your eyes, when your imagination is out of focus.

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

When ever I get the urge to write, I lie down and it usually passes.

Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.

Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down—he finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down.

Perfect grammar--persistent, continuous, sustained--is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.

I don't have time to write you a short letter, so I'm writing you a long one instead.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug (Mark Twain)

So there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't going to no more.

Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightening and the lightening bug.

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called separable verbs. The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance.

The difference between the ALMOST right word and the RIGHT word is really quite a large matter. It's the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect.

It is not well, when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry down too close to your own time—it is safest to speak only vaguely of your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself, which I now do. I was born without teeth—and there Richard III had the advantage of me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the advantage of him. My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest. But

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. -Mark Twain

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - 'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

The time to being writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

I apologize for the length of this letter. If I had had more time, it would have been shorter.