Quotes About Writing

In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write.

I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don't want to be a writer unless you have no choice - and if you have no choice, good luck to you.

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

Whatever you have a passion for, then you must do. If you want to write, write about something you know about.

I advise writing to oneself. If you don't want to read it, nobody else is going to read it.

I get a lot of letters from people. They say "I want to be a writer. What should I do?" I tell them to stop writing to me and to get on with it.

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

I'm sorry for writing you a four-page letter. I did not have time to write you a one-page letter.

Edit until your fingers bleed, then take a few deep breaths and edit some more...

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.

Annie Dillard. The Writing Life. HarperCollins: New York, 1989

He declared that it was his love for poetry—and his ambition to write great poetry—that had compelled his self-training. "To love poetry is to study it," he said to Ward. (Frost became one of America's greatest autodidacts.)

Talent isn't enough. Determination, ambition, energy and gall are also needed, as well as the need to have one's ego serve the writing and not the reverse.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

People often ask me: "Oh, how do you find the time to write books?" I say: "You never find it. You won't find it. You have to create it.

William Stafford was describing (though he was talking about writing) when he wrote . . . Just as the swimmer does not have a succession of handholds hidden in the water, but instead simply sweeps that yielding medium and finds it hurrying him along, so the writer passes his attention through what is at hand, and is propelled by a medium too thin and all-pervasive for the perceptions of nonbelievers who try to stay on the bank and fathom his accomplishment.6

I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.

Additionally, he liked to make his readers smile. Still in the preface, he writes that he avoided "academic technicalia," to which he adds a footnote. The footnote reads: Semper ubi, sub ubi, which translated means, "Always where, under where." In English it sounds like, "Always wear underwear.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

Just because everybody uses language, that doesn't mean that they can write even tolerable prose.

I think (Robert E.) Howard often wrote with his heart, but not always with his head.