Writing Quotes

My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am, Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me, I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you. Writing and talk do not prove me, I carry the plenum of proof in my face, With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

Walt Whitman

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions for opinions in good men is but knowledge in the making.

John Milton

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

Edwin Schlossberg

Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.

Stanislaw J. Lec, "Unkempt Thoughts".

Never be entirely idle but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

Thomas a Kempis

That everybody is allowed to learn to read spoileth in the long run not only writing but thinking.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

Joan Baez

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

E. L. Doctorow

Television has raised writing to a new low.

Samuel Goldwyn

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. N. B. This quote is commonly attributed to Voltaire, but it is not found in his writing.

S. G. Tallentyre

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what youre doing, or it comes out flat. You cant fake your way through this.

Real Live Preache

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinions in good men is but knowledge in the making.

John Milton

Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.

Jimmy Breslin

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

Enrique Jardiel Poncela

Advice to writers Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.

Stanislaw Lec

When writing a novel a writer should create living people people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Ernest Hemingway

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten - - Happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

Brenda Ueland

In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.

John Steinbeck

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.

Cyril Connolly

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch - Digging, mountain - Climbing, treadmill and childbirth... But amusing Never.

Edna Ferbe

Writing only leads to more writing.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.

Christina Baldwin

Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple - Minded...

Plato, _Phaedrus_

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be read once.

Cyril Connolly

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

W. Somerset Maugham

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.

Pliny The Elde

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Hermann Hesse