I like to collect quotes about writing and the writing life. Please e-mail me any good ones you find. My favorite ones are in bold.
Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow
I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily
by. How else, indeed, to clap the
net over the butterfly of the moment?
For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is
gone. That is where the writer
scores over his fellows: he
catches the changes of his mind on the hop. ~Vita Sackville-West
Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write
"very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it
should be. ~Mark Twain
I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~James Michener
The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least
space. ~Orson Scott Card
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is
the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. ~Mark Twain
I love writing. I
love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. ~James Michener
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't
brood. I'd type a little
faster. ~Isaac Asimov
I love being a writer.
What I can't stand is the paperwork. ~Peter De Vries
Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a
dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who
knows how to combine them.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of
defining it. ~Hannah Arendt
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most
valuable. ~Francis Bacon
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other
one. ~Baltasar Gracián
If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. ~Lord Byron
Writing is a struggle against silence. ~Carlos Fuentes
The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the
dishes. ~Agatha Christie
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. ~E.L. Doctorow
As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it
till I have it impending in me:
grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be
cut or it will fall. ~Virginia
Woolf
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to
live. ~Henry David Thoreau,
Journal, 19 August 1851
It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write. ~Sinclair Lewis
Writing is both mask and unveiling. ~E.B. White
Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. ~James Norman Hall
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is
for other people. ~Thomas Mann,
Essays of Three Decades, 1947
You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of
selected passages from the best writers in the world. ~G.K. Chesterton
The good writing of any age has always been the product of
someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers
that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long
bout of some painful illness. One
would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom
one can neither resist nor understand.
~George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1947
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things
familiar and familiar things new.
~Samuel Johnson
The best style is the style you don't notice. ~Somerset Maugham
Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place
him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man
is visible. ~Leo Tolstoy
Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. ~Goethe