I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.
James Michner, The World is My Home

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
Moliere

Remember: Writing can get you fed to a lion whose teeth draw your whole face into its foul wet breath and cut your skull with knives. There's no soft way to put this. A black hole swallows you up. Willpower's no help. Getting in print is like beating cancer but losing a lung, staying in print is hopeless. Your best work goes begging.....Today's paragraph comes, a word from the heart of the universe, and shines in the darkness, unquenched. And you ask for power, wisdom, and love as you make the anvil sing.
Donald Newlove

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to say.
Anais Nin

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
Anais Nin

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
Anais Nin

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.
Flannery O'Connor

I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.
Blaise Pascal

When I say artist I don’t mean in the narrow sense of the word—but the man who is building things—creating molding the earth—whether it be the plains of the west—or the iron ore of Penn. It’s all a big game of construction—some with a brush—some with a shovel—some choose a pen.
Jackson Pollock

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.
Jean Paul Richter

The most solid advice . . . for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
William Saroyan

When one’s not writing poems — and I’m not at the moment — you wonder how you ever did it. It’s like another country you can’t reach.
May Sarton

An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts on himself.
Irwin Shaw

Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.
Georges Simenon

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith

Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Red Smith

If you would be pungent, be brief, for it is with words as with sunbeams--the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
Robert Southey (1774-1843)

Hard writing makes easy reading.
Wallace Stegner

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
William Strunk, Jr. Elements of Style

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
William Styron

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Henry David Thoreau

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau

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

Truth is stranger than Fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to pissibilities; Truth isn't.
Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar (1897)

To hold a pen is to be at war.
Voltaire

In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.
Morris L. West

A kiss that speaks volumes is seldom a first edition.
Clare Whiting

My work is emotionally autobiographical. It has no relationship to the actual events of my life, but it reflects the emotional currents of my life. I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.
Tennessee Williams

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia Woolf

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth

All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.
William Wordsworth

Writing 1 - Quotes

Writers on Writing