Writing Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

What civilians do not understand—and to a writer anyone not a writer is a civilian—is that writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

John Gregory Dunne

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it has also become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it.

Aharon Appelfeld

If the Letter is to be in answer to another, begin by getting out that other letter and reading it through, in order to refresh your memory, as to what it is you have to answer, and as to your correspondent's present address (otherwise you will be sending your letter to his regular address in London, though he has been careful in writing to give you his Torquay address in full).

We must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste.

I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?

Raymond Chandler

The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while.

The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.

I'm not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they're wearing… I can always get a J. Crew catalogue… …So spare me, if you please, the hero's 'sharply intelligent blue eyes' and 'outthrust determined chin'.

For it is not the bare Words, but the Scope of the writer that giveth true light, by which any writing is to bee interpreted; and they that insist upon single Texts, without considering the main Designe, can derive no thing from them clearly; but rather by casting atomes of Scripture, as dust before mens eyes, make everything more obscure than it is; an ordinary artifice of those who seek not the truth, but their own advantage.

Everyone allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

William Faulkner

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Ernest Hemingway

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

Ernest Hemingway

Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the wndow of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?' would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered.

Ernest Hemingway