My Favorite Writing Quotes

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbury

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ~Anaïs Nin

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. ~Charles Peguy

I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "All Trivia," Afterthoughts, 1931

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~James Michener

The time to begin 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. ~Mark Twain

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov

Easy reading is damn hard writing. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. ~Emme Woodhull-Bäche

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. ~Mark Twain

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. ~Karl Kraus

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. ~James Michener

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. ~Isaac Asimov

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. ~Peter De Vries

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. ~English Professor (Name Unknown), Ohio University

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. ~Ann Beattie, Picturing Will, 1989

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. ~Gene Fowler

Be obscure clearly. ~E.B. White

Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. ~Graycie Harmon

Every writer I know has trouble writing. ~Joseph Heller

Writer's block is a disease for which there is no cure, only respite. ~Laurie Wordholt

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one. ~Baltasar Gracián

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. ~Enrique Jardiel Poncela

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. ~Lord Byron

I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. ~Jack Smith

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window. ~Burton Rascoe

The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. ~Agatha Christie

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Publication - is the auction of the Mind of Man. ~Emily Dickinson

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. ~Don Marquis

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. ~Henry David Thoreau

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff. ~Adlai Stevenson, as quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs

Most editors are failed writers - but so are most writers. ~T.S. Eliot

Pen names are masks that allow us to unmask ourselves. ~C. Astrid Weber

They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works. ~Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

If I'm trying to sleep, the ideas won't stop. If I'm trying to write, there appears a barren nothingness. ~Carrie Latet

The coroner will find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys. ~C. Astrid Weber

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. ~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1851

I am a man, and alive.... For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog. ~D.H. Lawrence, preface to Shestov, All Things Are Possible, 1938

Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head. ~From the movie Finding Forrester

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write. ~Sinclair Lewis

Let's hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks. ~Peter S. Prescott

It's not plagiarism - I'm recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do. ~Uniek Swain

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. ~Gustave Flaubert

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it - I might be writing in my dreams. ~Danzae Pace

A man will turn over half a library to make one book. ~Samuel Johnson

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published. ~Russell Lynes

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. ~James Norman Hall

Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word. ~Gail Hamilton

The artist's only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies. ~Faulkner, quoted in M. Cowley, Writers at Work, 1958

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947

Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ~Colette, Casual Chance, 1964

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. ~Jules Renard, Journal, 10 April 1895

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. ~Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf, 1927

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world. ~G.K. Chesterton

I keep little notepads all over the place to write down ideas as soon as they strike, but the ones that fill up the quickest are always the ones at my nightstand. ~Emily Logan Decens

A notepad by the bedside accounts for half the earnings of my livelihood. If it weren't for bedtime, half my novels would still be stuck at dock. -Ever Garrison

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. ~George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1947

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. ~Robert Benchley

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman. ~Van Wyck Brooks

I hope that these many quotes were helpful and inspirational to you. I had a lot to choose from but these are the ones I LOVE! Thank you for reading all of these quotes!