Writers and Writing Quotes

147 quotations about Writers and Writing
A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.
George Gribbon · Writers and Writing
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.
Peter Handke · Writers and Writing
I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Ernest Hemingway · Writers and Writing
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Ernest Hemingway · Writers and Writing
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Ernest Hemingway · Writers and Writing
The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
Ernest Hemingway · Writers and Writing
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway · Writers and Writing
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
Oliver Herford · Writers and Writing
The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.
Horace · Writers and Writing
Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.
Horace · Writers and Writing
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.
Horace · Writers and Writing
The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness.
Julia Ward Howe · Writers and Writing
I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.
Washington Irving · Writers and Writing
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James · Writers and Writing
Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
William James · Writers and Writing
In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.
Samuel Johnson · Writers and Writing
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
James Joyce · Writers and Writing
Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.
(Decimus Junius Juvenalis) Juvenal · Writers and Writing
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
Ken Kesey · Writers and Writing
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
Karl Kraus · Writers and Writing
It requires more than mere genius to be an author.
Jean De La Bruyere · Writers and Writing
The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.
Walter Savage Landor · Writers and Writing
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
D. H. Lawrence · Writers and Writing
The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.
Inigo de Leon · Writers and Writing
We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
Cecil Day Lewis · Writers and Writing

Authors on Writers and Writing

Margaret Anderson Isaac Asimov Richard Bach Walter Bagehot James Baldwin Saul Bellow Robert Benchley Arnold Bennett Thomas Berger Nicholas Boileau Christian Nevell Bovee Catherine Drinker Bowen Anita Brookner Robert Browning Jean De La Bruyere Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton Truman Capote Thomas Carlyle Charles Churchill Jackie Collins