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On Writing Quotes

Quotes tagged as "on-writing" Showing 1-30 of 354
William Wordsworth
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
William Wordsworth

Robert Louis Stevenson
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson

Jack London
“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
Jack London

F. Scott Fitzgerald
“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Dr. Seuss
“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”
Dr. Seuss

Isabel Allende
“Write what should not be forgotten.”
Isabel Allende

Stephen        King
“There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.”
Stephen King

Virginia Woolf
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Stephen        King
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
Stephen King

Leo Tolstoy
“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
Leo Tolstoy

Robert Frost
“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”
Robert Frost

Nora Roberts
“You can fix anything but a blank page.”
Nora Roberts

Mary Higgins Clark
“When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.”
Mary Higgins Clark

Stephen        King
“Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.”
Stephen King

George Orwell
“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Stephen        King
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Ernest Hemingway
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.”
Hemingway, Ernest

F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Phyllis A. Whitney
“A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.”
Phyllis A. Whitney, Guide to Fiction Writing

Philip Pullman
“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.”
Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

Maureen Johnson
“Writing is one of the few careers for which you essentially train yourself, the other two major ones being juggling and pickpocketing.”
Maureen Johnson

Margaret Atwood
“There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
Margaret Atwood , Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

Adrienne Rich
“You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”
Adrienne Rich

Mark Twain
“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”
Mark Twain

Flannery O'Connor
“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”
Flannery O'Connor

W. Somerset Maugham
“Only a mediocre person is always at his best. ”
W. Somerset Maugham

Mark Twain
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
Mark Twain

Anne Lamott
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Mark Twain
“Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.”
Mark Twain

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