~~~~~
In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.
Pearl S. Buck
The best way to become more creative is to create nothing.
Ilchi Lee
An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.
Juvenal
Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!
Deena Metzger
If you would be a writer, first be a reader. Only through the assimilation of ideas, thoughts and philosophies can one begin to focus his own ideas, thoughts and philosophies.
Allan W. Eckert
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Hunter Thompson
Life stand still here.
Virginia Woolf
The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.
Confucius
If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison
Half of being smart is knowing what you’re dumb at.
David Gerrold
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Walt Whitman
I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, “Is he sick?”
“No,” my wife says, “he’s writing something.”
James Thurber
I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries
Thinking is common to all.
Heraclitus
If you start to edit as you write, you are climbing into your ‘editor’ self, the self that reads. You’ve done plenty of reading, you don’t need practise right now.
Just write.
Sandra Jensen
Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
Oscar Wilde
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E. L. Doctorow
Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own bannister.
Herman Melville
When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what his thoughts are at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.
Edgar Allan Poe
Put weather in.
Joseph Hansen
A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark.
Dante Alighieri
A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
Charles Peguy
A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.
Sidney Smith
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
M. K. Simmons
An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.
Vincent Van Gogh
No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.
Van Wyck Brooks
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
There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again.
H. P. Lovecraft
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G.K. Chesterton
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker
If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
Vincent Van Gogh
Life itself is a quotation.
Jorge Luis Borges
Pay attention to the sound of words.
Dave Wolverton
Too often we opt for the decorative or the superficial, avoiding the beauty that Keats associated with truth – the terrible beauty, the terrifying beauty that strips us naked by its presence.
Deena Metzger
There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can’t get a good story out of it.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are begotten.
Meister Eckhart
Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.
Gustave Flaubert
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway
I started with all the handicaps, incapabilities, and helplessness. I didn’t talk when I was twenty. I taught myself by the act of writing.
Anaïs Nin
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Ernest Hemingway
Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant – you just don’t know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you’d mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.
Trust your demon.
Roger Zelazny
‘Whenever they start talking foreign,’ observed John Harris, forecastleman, starboard watch, ‘you know they are at a stand, and that all is, as you might say, in a matter of speaking, up.’
Patrick O’Brian
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert C. Benchley
I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.
Anthony Trollope
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.
Robert Graves
Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot
I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.
Anne Frank
We are all of us failures, at least, the best of us are.
James M. Barrie
I follow the scent of falling rain and head for the place where it is darkest. I follow the lightning and draw near to the place where it strikes.
Navaho Chant
There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one can agree what they are.
Somerset Maugham
If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.
Lord Byron
That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.
Hemingway
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Jack London
Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.
William Butler Yeats
Most people won’t realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
Katherine Ann Porter
First thought, best thought.
Allen Ginsberg
I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Third thought, best thought.
Frank Conroy
The First Key is that which opens the dark prisons in which the Sulphur is shut up: this it is which knows how to extract the seed out of the body, and which forms the Stone of the philosophers by the conjunction of the spirit with the body – of sulphur with mercury. Hermes has manifestly demonstrated the operation of this First Key by these words: In the caverns of the metals there is hidden the Stone, which is venerable, bright in colour, of mind sublime, and an open sea, the Sea of the Wise, in which they angle for their mysterious Fish. But the operations have a great deal of analogy one to another, to the end that those who have not the Lynx’s eyes may pursue wrong, and be lost. Take heed, therefore, not to be deceived here; for it is a truth, that in each work the Wise Artist ought to dissolve the body with the spirit; he must cut off the Raven’s head, whiten the Black, and vivify the White; yet it is properly in the First operation that the Wise Artist cuts off the head of the Black Dragon and of the Raven. Hence, Hermes says: What is born of the Crow is the beginning of this Art. Consider that it is by separation of the black, foul, and stinking fume of the Blackest Black that our astral, white, and resplendent Stone is formed, which contains in its veins the blood of the Pelican. It is at this First Purification of the Stone, and at this shining whiteness, that the work of the First Key is ended.
The Six Keys of Eudoxus
You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.
James M. Barrie
Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.
Stanislaw Lem
To look a fool is the secret of a wise man.
Edgar Allen Poe
Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.
James Joyce
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
Stephen King
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams
There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.
P. L. Travers
The hard part is getting to the top of page one.
Tom Stoppard
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Raymond Chandler
It’s not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
Wallace Stevens
I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.
Aleister Crowley
The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.
Diane Johnson
Resolve and thou art free.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
When people ask me how I know so much about mankind, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.
Anton Chekhov
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
Iris Murdoch
The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
Oscar Wilde
Writing is fighting.
Muhammad Ali
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.
C. J. Cherryh
The effect of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E.L. Doctorow
I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.
P. G. Wodehouse
An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
Mark Twain
Enter into the object, the whole of its delicate life, feeling as it feels.
Shinkichi Takahashi
The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.
Rumi
I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.
Sir Isaac Newton
He thought and suffered a good deal, but lacked the resolution to dare, the first requsite of a practicioner.
Lawrence Durrell
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.
Jean Giraudoux
Beauty is not caused. It is.
Emily Dickinson
We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I took a number of stories by popular writers as well as others by Maupassant, O. Henry, Stevenson, etc., and studied them carefully. Modifying what I learned over the next few years, I began to sell.
Louis L’Amour
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
Gustave Flaubert
All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Alice Walker
This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.
Charles Dickens
What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.
Meister Eckhart
Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing to do is shovel shit from a sitting position.
Stephen King
How to write a poem? Rip your chest wide open and pour out whatever is crowded there.
Pirjo Zeylon
To write must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse.
Henry Miller
At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.
Lao Tzu
The secret is to start a story near the ending.
Chris Offut
Why don’t you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.
P. G. Wodehouse
A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end – but not necessarily in that order.
Jean Luc Godard
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
Lord Byron
God protects those he loves from worthless reading.
J.K. Lavater
Good writing is true writing.
Hemingway
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
Gloria Steinem
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
Ray Bradbury
The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
William James
I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.
Dorothy Parker
Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.
J. P. Donleavy
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
John le Carre
I guess I don’t so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.
Benjamin Franklin
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Henry Brooks Adams
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Write what comes up.
Barbara Turner-Vesselago
You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.
Flannery O’Connor
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its supreme purpose through him.
Carl Jung
Most writers need to write. I write for money, really. If I won the lottery, I would never write another word. I would rather read.
Clarissa Dickson Wright
You must not come lightly to the blank page.
Stephen King
I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.
Harold Ross
Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.
Heraclitus
Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.
J. Krishnamurti
I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.
P. G. Wodehouse
If you desire faith, then you have faith enough.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A poet never speaks directly, as to someone at the breakfast table.
William Butler Yeats
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Doris Lessing
There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a story teller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three – storyteller, teacher, enchanter – but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
Vladimir Nabokov
Outside of a dog, a man’s best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
Groucho Marx
There is no need to imagine before you paint. Painting brings forth imagination.
Kazuaki Tanahashi
In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.
Geoffrey Cotterell
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot
I do not write for such dull elves as have not a deal of ingenuity themselves.
Jane Austen
Read poetry: it’s quite hard.
Don Paterson
Write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.
Gertrude Stein
The inner life strengthens the outer life, and vice versa. And it is stories that can unite these two precious worlds – one mundane, the other mythic.
Clarrissa Pinkola Estés
Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.
Lawrence Kasdan
Nature is the art of God.
Dante Alighieri
I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I’m one of the world’s great rewriters.
James A. Michener
A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
Mignon McLaughlin
One can never consent to creep when one feels the impulse to soar.
Helen Keller
Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already.
Marcus Aurelius
In composing, as a general rule, run a pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.
Sydney Smith
Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truth.
Henry Miller
Dream making emerges from a fundamental desire for intimacy, the love of creation, and the necessity to speak.
Deena Metzger
I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O’Connor
Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, consider how it is spelled, and, if you do not remember, turn to a dictionary. It produces great praise to a lady to spell well.
Thomas Jefferson to his daughter
Lighting does occasionally strike and occasionally the result isn’t a corpse.
Tillie Olsen
The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
Kahlil Gibran
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Mark Twain
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
William Shakespeare
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
James Michener
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
Carl Jung
Make a list of everything you must not write about.
Deena Metzger
The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.
George Bernard Shaw
You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
G.K. Chesterton
It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.
Ernest Hemingway
Intolerance is evidence of impotence.
Aleister Crowley
It’s not plagiarism – I’m recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do.
Uniek Swain
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
Daphne Du Maurier
A work of art has an author, and yet, when perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it.
Simone Weil
You thunder and lightning too much the reader ceases to get under the bed by and by.
Mark Twain
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
Somerset Maugham
A metaphor is like a simile.
Unknown
Life’s enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.
Lord Byron
I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.
Philip Roth
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
William James
I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
Elmore Leonard
An artist cannot do anything slovenly.
Jane Austen
Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.
Voltaire
I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.
Oscar Wilde
I firmly believe every book was meant to be written.
Marchette Chute
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman
Nothing is made worse or better by praise.
Marcus Aurelius
Writer’s block is simply a failure of ego.
Norman Mailer
Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one; it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself.
Henry Miller
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
Isaac Asimov
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
Robert Frost
Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.
Camille Paglia
I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
Honore de Balzac
Thou art God, and I am God and all that groks is God.
Robert Heinlein
A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
Jane Austen
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth
When you are describing,
A shape or sound or tint;
Don’t state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.
Lewis Carroll
Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Philip Larkin
I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.
H.G. Wells
The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
Frederich Nietzsche
I never dare to write as funny as I can.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it – whatever it is they’re doing – it hasn’t been written right.
Sloan Wilson
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story – and then your story!
Ford Madox Ford
Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person’s reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn’t think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, “I knew girls who saved his gum.”
Amy Hempel
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Robert Heinlein
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
Joyce Carol Oates
An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he’d have somebody to look up to.
Gene Fowler
I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.
Stephen Wright
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
Truman Capote
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.
Hart Crane
Writers are just people who have a whole lot on the inside that they need to get to the outside, with pen and paper as their preferred method of transport. Same with dancers, artists, and singers – all the same urges with differing transportation.
Graycie Harmon
Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story.
Katherine Anne Porter
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Benjamin Franklin
Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.
Thomas Berger
It’s not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic.
Eric A. Burns
To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.
Epictetus
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
Franz Kafka
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
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
Francois-Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand
Adults are just obsolete children.
Dr Seuss
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound
People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
Herbert Spencer
People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.
Harlan Ellison
Bravery never goes out of fashion.
William Makepeace Thackeray
I’ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can’t remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.
Anton Chekhov
True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
Alexander Pope
Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.
Graycie Harmon
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
Gracián
Art is the proper task of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
Ray Bradbury
The key to non-anxious sermon-writing is that it’s not about me. It’s about the congregation. I honor the fact that the listeners bring more to the sermon than I do. I remind myself of the hundreds of times someone says, “I loved how you said…,” and then tell me things that they heard that were nowhere in my text and that I never said.
Reverend Sean Parker Dennison
Great things are done when men and mountains meet.
William Blake
Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith
I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.
Leonardo da Vinci
Poetry gave me back my voice.
Maya Angelou
Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.
Meg Chittenden
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
Erasmus
Wake the happy words.
Theodore Roethke
No one connected intimately with a writer has any appreciation of his temperament, except to think him overdoing everything.
Zane Grey
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
Albert Camus
I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.
P. G. Wodehouse
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot
I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.
John Updike
Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
Jackson Pollock
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
Henry James
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.
Terry Pratchett
Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest. The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.
Lord Byron
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
Vladimir Nabakov
Writers have lives, too.
Doug Kurtz
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.
Truman Capote
Be obscure clearly.
E.B. White
If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is “God is crying.” And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is “Probably because of something you did.”
Jack Handy
Writing well means never having to say, ‘I guess you had to be there.’
Jef Mallett
The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.
Anthony Trollope
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it. A novel’s whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.
Diane Johnson
Avoid cliches like the plague. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
William Safire
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Anton Chekhov
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
Ray Bradbury
‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, very gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’
Lewis Carroll
Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot
Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
P. G. Wodehouse
Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible.
H. P. Lovecraft
If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me.
William Shakespeare
Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wanted to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.
L. Ron Hubbard
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau
Never throw up on an editor.
Ellen Datlow
A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.
W. Somerset Maugham
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
Imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know.
Jane Roberts
Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.
Sharon O’Brien
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle.
John Cheever
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.
Oscar Wilde
I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.
Benjamin Franklin
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American dream?
Homer Simpson
No ideas but in things.
William Carlos Williams
Writing is its own reward.
Henry Miller
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
Ronald Reagan
It’s hard enough to write a good drama, it’s much harder to write a good comedy, and it’s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
Jack Lemmon
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
Orson Scott Card
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
Leonardo da Vinci
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
Francis Bacon
Writing is a struggle against silence.
Carlos Fuentes
The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.
Agatha Christie
We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself.
Paracelsus
After being turned down by numerous publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.
George Ade
There is nothing fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass...unless you are an sf writer, in which case pretty soon you are viewing crab grass with suspicion. What are it’s real motives? And who sent it here in the first place? It only looks like crab grass. That’s what they want us to think it is. One day the crab grass suit will fall off and their true identity will be revealed. By then the Pentagon will be full of crab grass and it’ll be too late. The crab grass, or what we took to be crab grass, will dictate terms.
Phillip K. Dick
The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
Ursula K. LeGuin
The conditions of the Transvaal ordinance cannot in the opinion of His Majesty’s Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.
Winston Churchill
Novelists: fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.
Fay Weldon
A writer’s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
Zadie Smith
Invent your own mythology or be slave to another man’s.
William Blake
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
John Lennon
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
Walt Whitman
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
Karl Kraus
I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.
Howard Aiken
Getting ahead in a difficult profession – singing, acting, writing, whatever – requires avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against staggering blows and unfair reversals.
Sophia Loren
Be curious, not judgmental.
Walt Whitman
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.
Woody Allen
You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.
Maxim Gorky
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde
Of course the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you – if you don’t play, you can’t win.
Robert Heinlein
I’ve always said fantasy is sort of ‘stealth philosophy’.
Terry Goodkind
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Ursula K. LeGuin
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
Ring Lardner
There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people if he’s any good.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.
Fran Lebowitz
Writing well is the best revenge.
Dorothy Parker
What I am saying, I suppose, is that you write as if everyone is dead. Then you face the music. I don’t know any other way to keep the teeth sharp and the spirit alive.
Lynn Freed
I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
Steve Martin
To anyone capable of suspending for a moment the cavortings of the rational mind, of accepting myth for what it is – not lie but the very veritable truth – it needs no great inward effort to act upon such advice. It’s a matter, merely, of listening.
P. L. Travers
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.
Jane Austen
Only great minds can afford a simple style.
Stendhal
Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.
Rod Serling
Tell the truth, but tell it slant.
Emily Dickinson
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.
Voltaire
From the first words of a fairy story, we relax – not because we are entertained but because we are in the presence of truthfulness.
Deena Metzger
Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words.
Jonathan Swift
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.
Charles Dickens
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
Reggie Leach
I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind – and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
Michel de Montaigne
Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.
Anne McCaffrey
I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
Z. N. Hurston
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Oscar Wilde
There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
H.L. Mencken
Writing is the flip side of sex – it’s good only when it’s over.
Hunter S. Thompson
I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.
Lord Brabazon
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
Sir Francis Bacon
Less than an hour before, he had congratulated himself on escaping all the traps of Earth, all the snares of Man. Not knowing that the greatest trap of all, the final and the fatal trap, lay on this present planet.
Clifford D. Simak
I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they’re dead.
Samuel Goldwyn
An artist is his own fault.
John O’Hara
Somebody is a good dreamer.
Pirjo Zeylon
Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire, but it’s damn good for you.
J.R.R. Tolkien
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
Lawrence Durrell
Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
Thomas Bulfinch
Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.
Lewis Carroll
On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind – to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.
Terry Brooks
Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.
Aeschylus
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
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
They lard their lean books with the fat of others’ works.
Robert Burton
A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
Aldous Huxley
Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.
Dorothy Parker
Nature also forges man, now a gold man, now a silver man, now a fig man, now a bean man.
Paracelsus
No one does anything from a single motive.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
H. L. Mencken
The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy
He was such a bad writer, they revoked his poetic license.
Milton Berle
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.
Stephen Leigh
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles
Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.
Christian Dior
I’m very proud of my flops, as much as of my successes.
Francis Ford Coppola
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire
What is a hero without love for mankind?
Doris Lessing
You taught me language and my profit on’t is I know how to curse.
William Shakespeare
Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
Ray Bradbury
Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.
Hermann Hesse
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Lewis Carroll
All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart.
Carlos Castaneda
He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.
Washington Irving
Write what you like; there is no other rule.
O. Henry
A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
P. L. Travers
Anybody can make an easy deal, but only a true agent can sell a dog.
Irving “Swifty” Lazar
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.
James Joyce
At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance – that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curiosity – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don’t think the talent makes much difference, whether you’ve got it or not.
William Faulkner
Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death of air, and earth in the death of water.
Heraclitus
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just begins
to live that day.
Emily Dickinson
If it has horses and swords in it, it’s a fantasy, unless it also has a rocketship in it, in which case it becomes science fiction. The only thing that’ll turn a story with a rocketship in it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail.
Debra Doyle
Keep a diary and one day it’ll keep you.
Mae West
Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life.
James Norman Hall
The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
Joan Baez
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
The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.
J. W. Goethe
He is able who thinks he is able.
Buddha
It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.
Isaac Asimov
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.
Socrates
I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
Gore Vidal
The adjective is the enemy of the noun.
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Anybody can have ideas – the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
Mark Twain
How do I know what I think, until I see what I say?
E. M. Forster
‘It is odd how the law always harps upon the unnaturalness of sodomy,’ observed Stephen. ‘Though I know at least two judges who are paederasts; and of course barristers.’
Patrick O’Brian
You have to talk to the stone, and it has to talk to you.
Ben Nighthorse Campbell
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain
I feel happy to terrify kids.
R. L. Stine
The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.
Ayn Rand
Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord.
Nikolai Gogol
I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.
Anne Frank
Everything in this world has a hidden meaning.
Nikos Kazantzakis
He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.
Michel de Montaigne
Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.
William Makepeace Thackeray
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
Franz Kafka
Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.
Joseph Campbell
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
Ernest Hemingway
Writing is a fairly lonely business unless you invite people in to watch you do it, which is often distracting and then you have to ask them to leave.
Marc Lawrence
I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else by the same name.
Aldous Huxley
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. Tolerance for uncertainty is a prerequisite for succeeding.
David Byles and Ted Orland
Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
Writing is a product of silence.
Carrie Latet
Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute.
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end – that is what you must be able to attain.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.
Mark Twain
There are many reasons why novelists write – but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Kurt Vonnegut
If you wait for inspiration, you’re not a writer, but a waiter.
Louis L’Amour
Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Anthony Burgess
I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.
Joseph Campbell
To go against sense, to go against reason, to deliberately deconstruct the world of grammar and thoughtful orderliness is, in effect, to destroy the world as we know it and allow something new to emerge. Grammar is, above all, a system of thought and perception, the way the world is defined and primary relationships are perceived.
Deena Metzger
Big words are always punished.
Sophocles
Beware thoughts that come in the night.
William Least Heat-Moon
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for?
Alice Walker
Observe, don’t imitate.
John M. Ford
‘I have no notion of two sisters wearing the same clothes, the same flaunting meretricious gawds, the same tortured Gorgon curls low over their brutish criminal foreheads; it bespeaks a superfetation of vulgarity, both innate and studiously acquired.’
Patrick O’Brian
The proper use of imagination can propel ideas in the direction you desire.
Jane Roberts
Being scared can keep a man from getting killed, and often makes a better fighter of him.
Louis L’Amour
I desired dragons with a profound desire.
J.R.R. Tolkien
In the aftermath of the crisis, tulip mania gave way to tulip-phobia. The professor of botany at Leyden, Evrard Forstius, was said to be so incensed by the flower that he could not see a tulip without attacking it viciously with his stick.
Edward Chancellor
Should I lose my demons, wherefore my angels?
Nathanial Hawthorne
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
William Butler Yeats
Fear is excitement without the breath.
Robert Heller
Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
Aristotle
The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
Pablo Neruda
I still can’t decide which is more fun – reading or writing.
Rex Stout
Doughnuts. Is there anything they can’t do?
Homer Simpson
From a technical point of view there are two essential things to solve or create when writing a novel. The first is the invention of the narrator. I think the narrator is the most important character in a novel. In some cases this importance is obvious because the narrator is also a central figure, a central character in the novel. In other cases, the narrator is not a character, not a visible figure, but an invisible person whose creation is even more complicated and difficult than the creation of one of the characters.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
André Gide
Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
William Gibson
A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
John le Carre
You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens.
Frederik Pohl
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
Ursula K. LeGuin
If you liked being a teenager, there’s something really wrong with you.
Stephen King
I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, “I will tell you a story,” and then he passes the hat.
Robertson Davies
If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.
Virginia Woolf
A man who is a genius and doesn’t know it, probably isn’t.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Every artist joins a conversation that’s been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
John Barth
Be anything you want to be, but don’t be dull.
Frank Robinson
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Herman Melville
Only self-educated is educated. Others are merely taught.
Erno Paasilinna
No tricks.
Raymond Carver
To write is, above all else, to construct a self.
Deena Metzger
There is in each of us an ongoing story. It contains our meaning and our destiny. And it goes on inevitably whether we pay attention to it or not.
Al Kreinheder
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
Henry David Thoreau
The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his own deeds.
Harold Hayes
A writer’s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.
Ethel Wilson
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
Contrary to what many of you may imagine, a career in letters is not without its drawbacks – chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to sit down and write.
Fran Lebowitz
My task is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel. It is, before all, to make you see. That – and no more – and it is everything.
Joseph Conrad
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
William Faulkner
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
Winston Churchill
I may as well tell you that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!
P. G. Wodehouse
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Miguel de Cervantes
Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip Larkin
Following the creative is a path, but it is not a known path.
Deena Metzger
When a mighty tree is felled, a star falls from the sky. Before you cut down a mahogany you should ask permission of the keeper of the forest, and you should ask permission of the keeper of the star.
Chan K’in
To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder.
Louis L’Amour
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
Joseph Campbell
I have no mouth, and I must scream.
Harlan Ellison
When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
Clifton Fadiman
Never let inexperience get in the way of ambition.
Terry Josephson
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying.
Woody Allen
Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write.
William Faulkner
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
Anne Lamott
The reality is more excellent than the report.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
Somerset Maugham
The Sibyl with raving mouth utters solemn, unadorned, unlovely words, but she reaches out over a thousand years with her voice because the god is in her.
Heraclitus
In a thousand words I can have the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?
Roy H. Williams
Decide to examine the contents of your conscious mind.
Jane Roberts
We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.
Terry Brooks
Every activity of the creative process requires that we bring spirit into form, that we create a vessel – ourselves or a work of art – that can hold the spirit.
Deena Metzger
Via clear nature of mind and methods of words, the glows of meanings and direct perceptions: with these four kinds of excellent awareness all things are manifest in views compassionate.
Prajna Paramita
In art economy is always beauty.
Henry James
No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I like to write when I feel spiteful: it’s like having a good sneeze.
D.H. Lawrence
The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.
William Goldman
Speak, that I may see thee.
Ben Jonson
This writing business. Pencils and whatnot. Overrated, if you ask me.
Winnie the Pooh
A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.
Sidney Sheldon
Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
Ecclesiastes
Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Colette
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
Joseph Conrad
The only time to believe any kind of rating is when it shows you at the top.
Bob Hope
He who limps is still walking.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.
Dr Samuel Johnson
A book is like a man – clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
John Steinbeck
Talent is a long patience.
Gustave Flaubert
He who Works with his Hands, is a Laborer.
He who Works with his Hands and his Head is a Craftsman.
He who Works with his Hands, his Head, and his Heart is an Artist.
Seneca
The archetypal situation and the mythic realm hover around the perimeters of story.
Deena Metzger
A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
Robert Burton
Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it.
Garrison Keillor
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
First, find out what your hero wants. Then just follow him.
Ray Bradbury
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
Ayn Rand
I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.
Hortense Calisher
Mystery is the basic element of all works of art.
Luis Buñuel
Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.
Ayn Rand
It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence.
Erasmus
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one’s pen.
Leo Tolstoy
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
Elias Canetti
My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meets with a murderer.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don’t you know, if you see what I mean.
P. G. Wodehouse
Writers speak stench.
Franz Kafka
Deep writing comes from our bodies, from our breath, and from our ability to remain solid in the places that scare us.
Laraine Herring
What I would say to a young person trying to become a writer is Don’t. It won’t make any difference because they’ll do it anyway, but they really shouldn’t.
Robert Burton
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
Walter Bagehot
When the sun hit that bonnet just right, I could swear I saw angels in her hair.
Billy-Bob Hornwinkle
The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The clothes make the man. Naked people contribute little or nothing to society.
Mark Twain
It’s just my smart ass gorglings.
Pirjo Zeylon
Editing is Human, free-writing Divine!
Milli Thornton
I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
Oscar Wilde
One extends one’s limits only by exceeding them.
M. Scott Peck
Comedy has to be done en clair. You can’t blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.
James Thurber
Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.
Ogden Nash
If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.
Dante Alighieri
The best things in life aren’t things.
Art Buchwald
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all humbug.
Cyril Connolly
I am two with nature.
Woody Allen
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public.
Winston Churchill
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
Rainer Maria Rilke
There are two kinds of light – the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
James Thurber
I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.
Jackson Pollock
The best stories don’t come from good vs. bad but from good vs. good.
Leo Tolstoy
The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, moulded and constructed in a personal form and an original manner.
Goethe
One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.
Jules Renard
Too clever is dumb.
Ogden Nash
All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch.
Francis Bacon
He had the look of one who had drained the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.
P. G. Wodehouse
There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.
James Thurber
If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Virginia Woolf
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Amy Lowell
I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.
Henry James
These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me – anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.
Henry David Thoreau
It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.
John Wooden
Spinning straw into gold is not just a pretty phrase or an image from a fanciful tale but is a real activity.
Deena Metzger
A new character has come on the scene. I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, but there he came walking through the woods of Ithilien.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.
James Herriot
I haven’t much opinion of words. They’re apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that’s what I say.
Ellen Glasgow
We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.
Henry David Thoreau
I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go downstairs five miles or more.
Herman Melville
We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
Adolph Hitler
I hope that after I die, people will say of me: “That guy sure owed me a lot of money.”
Jack Handy
Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.
Mark Twain
A story is: the king died, the queen died. A plot is: the king died, the queen died of grief.
E. M. Forster
How every fool can play upon the word!
William Shakespeare
Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.
James Stephen
If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you can’t tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf
Thinking is linking.
P. L. Travers
The secret of being tiresome is in telling everything.
Voltaire
There are three necessary elements in a story – exposition, development, and drama. Exposition we may illustrate as “John Fortescue was a solicitor in the little town of X”; development as “One day Mrs Fortescue told him she was about to leave him for another man”; and drama as “You will do nothing of the kind,” he said.
Frank O’Connor
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable tool, and therefore are most economical in its use.
Mark Twain
Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
Franz Kafka
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
James Thurber
A book is so much a part of oneself that in delivering it to the public one feels as if one were pushing one’s own child out into the traffic.
Quentin Bell
A fool is agog at every word.
Heraclitus
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.
Ursula K. Le Guin
A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.
John Shedd
There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
Rainer Maria Rilke
It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.
Theodore Sturgeon
I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality seems to me to be the supreme virtue of the novel – the merit upon which all its other merits hopelessly and submissively depend. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist.
Henry James
Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, a teacher, an acquaintance, or a stranger.
Franklin Jones
You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.
Horace
I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance – a sharp, vindictive glance.
James Thurber
He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays – cynical, but hopeful.
Rose Macaulay
A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.
Lao Tzu
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.
Michel Foucault
You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
Arthur Polotnik
I don’t believe in writers’ block. Plumbers don’t get plumbers’ block. Why should writing be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working?
Philip Pullman
Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.
Anthony Burgess
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Jessamyn West
Study the rules so that you won’t beat yourself by not knowing something.
Babe Didricksen Zaharias
There is one story and one story only.
Robert Graves
When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.
William Faulkner
The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure.
M.C. Escher
Always write with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken.
C. S. Lewis
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
James A. Michener
I do like a little romance, just a sniff, as I call it, of the rocks and valleys. Of course, bread-and-cheese is the real thing. The rocks and valleys are no good at all, if you haven’t got that.
Anthony Trollope
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Carl Jung
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
Douglas Adams
His words were simple words enough
And yet he used them so
That what in other mouths was rough
In his seemed musical and low.
James Russell Lowell
And by the way, everything in life is writable if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
Vladimir Nabakov
Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.
John O’Hara
Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
William Butler Yeats
A writer’s duty is to register what it is like to be in the world.
Zadie Smith
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The beginning is always today.
Mary Wollstonecraft
I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.
Henry David Thoreau
I do not think I have ever prayed in words. I pray in conscious desire. I pray in concepts – concepts of whole ideas, not parts. I never go to sleep at night without consciously thinking that kind of prayer in which I express desire in whole ideas of what my day for the morrow must be. I do not weaken my prayer by trying to find words for it. I keep my desire strong by not thus dividing it into words or in parts. My prayers are communions, not conversations.
Walter Russell
Nothing builds confidence like accomplishment.
Thomas Carlyle
The Malabar Caves represented an area in which concentration can take place. A cavity. Something to focus everything up: to engender an event like an egg.
E. M. Forster
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
Anthony Trollope
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson
The words of truth are always paradoxical.
Lao Tzu
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
G. K. Chesterton
“Do you know,” Peter asked, “why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to listen to the stories.”
James M. Barrie
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.
J P Donleavy
The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, brain surgery.
Robert Cormier
Contact with the larger story is imperative in order to gain wisdom and to restore those parts of ourselves that become amputated in a secular society.
Deena Metzger
I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.
John D. MacDonald
Everything changes when you change.
Jim Rohn
The poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
William Butler Yeats
Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.
Elizabeth Bowen
And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born.
Jack Kerouac
When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.
Blaise Pascal
Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.
Katherine Mansfield
Start early and work hard. A writer’s apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he’s almost ready to begin. That takes a while.
David Eddings
You must push further and harder, reach deeper into your own mind until you break through into the strange and terrible country wherein live your own dreams.
Gardner Dozois
I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
John Steinbeck
The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
Benjamin Disraeli
I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
Insanity is the illusion you are wrong.
Verber Quimply
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
Richard Bach
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
Mark Twain
Save me the first dance in your dreams tonight.
Frank Sinatra
It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.
Samuel Johnson
Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.
Elie Wiesel
To see things in the seed, that is genius.
Lao Tzu
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.
James Thurber
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I could just do the whole thing in one day but sadly my character had gone to bed at the end of the last scene.
Sandra Jensen
The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
Mark Twain
There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.
Anthony Trollope
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water.
Kurt Vonnegut
The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.
James Frey
That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of one.
Hermes Trismegistus
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
William Butler Yeats
All the information you need can be given in dialogue.
Elmore Leonard
Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
David Ben Gurion
There is no iron that can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect as a period placed at just the right moment.
Isaac Babel
All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
Ernest Hemingway
Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.
Kahlil Gibran
Read almost any newspaper interview, and you’ll conclude that the dialogue of real people is more stilted and implausible than the dialogue of invented characters. Trying to make real people sound real on the page is necessarily an exercise in impressionism. Nothing teaches one the subtleties of punctuation so well as an attempt to take a skein of actual speech and restore to it the pauses, ellipses, switches of tone and speed, that it had in life.
Jonathan Raban
It is all very well to write books, but can you wiggle your ears?
James M. Barrie
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I suppose I’m one of those fellows my father always warned me against.
P. G. Wodehouse
Art is elimination of the unnecessary.
Waldo Salt
Make everybody fall out of the plane first, and then explain who they were and why they were in the plane to begin with.
Nancy Ann Dibble
A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.
Henrik Ibsen
When the book comes out it may hurt you – but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first.
James Baldwin
The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you.
Somerset Maugham
Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand.
Homer Simpson
At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.
H. P. Lovecraft
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.
Norman Mailer
Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.
Ethan Hubbard
When it came to my art, I went my own way and did not follow the trends.
Frank Frazetta
When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
Abraham Lincoln
If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it.
Art Buchwald
Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.
Henry David Thoreau
Kindness in words creates confidence.
Lao Tzu
Think before you speak, is criticism’s motto; speak before you think is creation’s.
E. M. Forster
If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.
Anton Chekhov
Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Rumi
Whatever fortune brings, don’t be afraid of doing things.
Herman Melville
It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.
Katherine Paterson
So this is always the key: you have to write the book you love, the book that’s alive in your heart. That’s the one you have to write.
Lurleen McDaniel
How does one get to be a bit of a bee?
P. L. Travers
You cannot escape your own attitudes, for they will form the nature of what you see.
Jane Roberts
I was a free man in Paris.
Joni Mitchell
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
G. B. Shaw
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Omar Khayyam
People die, but books never die.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein
The blank page gives the right to dream.
Gaston Bachelard
The poet is the one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anaïs Nin
A year from now you’ll wish you had started today.
Karen Lamb
In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
T. S. Eliot
Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!
William Butler Yeats
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
Thomas Paine
“Please,” she whispered as she opened the book, “please get me out of here just for an hour or so, please take me far, far away.”
Cornelia Funke
A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down.
Virginia Woolf
A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness.
Bill Barich
Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.
John Steinbeck
As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs.
William Blake
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
H. P. Lovecraft
I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
Jack Kerouac
It takes an awful long time to not write a book.
Douglas Adams
Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
Edward Gibbon
To be matter of fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy – and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.
Robert A. Heinlein
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
Carl Jung
Nothing will work unless you do.
Maya Angelou
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.
William Faulkner
The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control.
Ogden Nash
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
William Blake
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. To be strict without being too self-excoriating. Not stopping too often to think it’s going well (or not too badly), simply to keep rowing along.
Susan Sontag
When in doubt, go to your where.
Viola Spolin
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
James Thurber
Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men.
Confucius
Hold a book in your hand and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Hebrew Saying
I wrote no words this day.
Lynda Carnes
Let the readers do some of the work themselves.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold,
and leaves of gold there grew.
Of wind I sang, a wind there came
and in the branches blew.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The use of point of view is to bring the reader into immediate and continuous contact with the heart of the story and sustain him there.
Tom Jenks
When I read it, I don’t wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
Norman Mailer
I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
Erma Bombeck
I love to doubt as well as know.
Dante Alighieri
To finish is a sadness to a writer – a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.
John Steinbeck
The loveship of her Guardian was all she knew of men.
Bernice Ellis
A child of three once said to me, ‘I am two boys, Goodly and Badly.’ Alas, too young for this! I thought, but at the same time recalled that truth requires us to be young, no matter what our age. And then came the faltering, anxious question – ‘Which do you like best?’ I knew the answer, and all the breadth and depth of it, but had to appear to pay it mind. If I chose Goodly, then Badly would be in the wilderness, alone with his badliness and lost. If Badly, then Goodly would be in the same plight, alone with his goodliness. ‘Joy and woe are woven fine/A clothing for the soul divine.’ ‘To tell you the truth,’ I said gravely, ‘I like them both the same.’ The look of anxiety turned to relief and a trustful hand met mine.
Pamela Travers
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.
D. H. Lawrence
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
The coroner will find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys.
Astrid Weber
Don’t plan anything.
Write what comes up.
Give all the details.
Go fearward.
Don’t edit.
Barbara Turner-Vesselago
Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?
A. A. Milne
If a book is not alive in the writer’s mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit.
Stephen King
Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten, – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
Brenda Ueland
A story isn’t about a moment in time, a story is about the moment in time.
W. D. Wetherell
The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.
Donald Barthelme
I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart’s history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self-assertion of youth.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Problems in writing can come unknotted in a miraculous way after a nap. I go to sleep with the problem, and wake up with the answer.
Patricia Highsmith
All good ideas arrive by chance.
Max Ernst
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive.
Salman Rushdie
Sometimes if I’m stuck for a word I just put X – easy to search for later when I come to edit.
Sandra Jensen
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions.
Martha Graham
Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
Will Rogers
Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived.
Helen Keller
You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it’s going to be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children.
Madeleine L’Engle
We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark.
H. P. Lovecraft
If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
Abraham Lincoln
Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams,
Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.
William Butler Yeats
There’s nothing more empty than a life devoted to leisure.
George Hamilton
Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.
Matthew Arnold
I think “taste” is a social concept, not an artistic one. Our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
John Updike
Always behave as though tomorrow is the day.
Buck Henry
You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.
Ray Bradbury
Something was swinging from a slightly bowed branch.
Michelle Bidwell
You can do whatever you want through imagination and characters when writing fiction. Anything.
Michael Swerdloff
Plain words are special to me.
Bernice Ellis
I am starting to fall in love with Quinlan. It’s going to suck when I have to kill him.
Leigh-Anne Tyson
Says the God of Art: I shall give you hunger, and pain, and sleepless nights. Also beauty, and satisfactions known to few, and glimpses of the heavenly life. None of these you shall have continually, and of their comings and goings you shall not be foretold.
Howard Lindsay
I’m dying to get into some action.
Sandra Jensen
Every time I sit down, someone else is speaking.
Jody Strimling-Muchow
Creativity means that I access.
Jeanne Beauchamp Adwani
Nature never breaks her own laws.
Leonardo da Vinci
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
H. P. Lovecraft
Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never yet been set up a statue in honor of a critic.
Jean Sibelius
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
‘Fool!’ said my Muse to me, ‘look to thy heart and write.’
Sir Philip Sidney
I am bigger than the spider.
Bernice Ellis
The story will only go as far as the author will allow it.
Michael Swerdloff
Fiction is about stuff that’s screwed up.
Nancy Kress
Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.
James Joyce
I am a man, and alive. For this reason I am a novelist.
D.H. Lawrence
I’m trying not to wonder because if I wonder too much, doubt may take over and then I’ll never get it done.
Andrea Mauk
Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport.
George V. Higgins
Exuberance is beauty.
William Blake
I want to leap into a new future for myself.
Bernice Ellis
Forget absolutely everything you thought you were or are going to do. Just write – whatever – and count the words.
Gabriele Stehle
He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.
P. G. Wodehouse
Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.
James Thurber
It’s about keeping technique from interrupting the creative process.
Kellie Hall
Swallowing All whole, cleansing through Perfection, I hear the grass grow, I am One with the rodent’s heartbeat. In the bliss of Eleven, I die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence, becoming One with that Silence, Om.
Claire Born
Go for dialogue.
Sandra Jensen
Probably morning is best for me.
Jenni Sulkow
I tumble together to a mound, unable to concern myself.
Pirjo Zeylon
Who knows what spawn can spring from such lunatic loins of evil?
Herbunger Vladstaff
A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.
Abraham Lincoln
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.
William Butler Yeats
Standing at the edge of the cliff and helping others leap is easier than leaping.
Michael Swerdloff
It’s like the novel is writing itself.
Jody Strimling-Muchow
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E.L. Doctorow
I am an actor at heart. I just acted out my story and then wrote it down.
Mame Burkett
Can we really heal and forgive if we don’t see both roles in a play as one?
Pirjo Zeylon
How you do anything is how you do everything.
Zen proverb
They just discovered the windshield was covered in butterfly wings.
Leigh-Anne Tyson
Chronology plays no part in what I’ve written to date.
Lindsay McLeod Espinoza
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Jules Renard
The trade of authorship is a violent and indestructible obsession.
George Sand
One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.
Stephen King
I want my novel.
Bernice Ellis
If I get out of the way, much happens.
Michael Swerdloff
English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education – sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.
E. B. White
Pot of tea – check. Raining outside – check.
Leigh-Anne Tyson
I’m not surprised that you are falling in love with Mr. Big.
Michelle Bidwell
One word at a time. That’s the only way to write the elephant.
Jody Strimling-Muchow
Keep in mind that the person to write for is yourself. Tell the story that you most desperately want to read.
Susan Isaacs
The rule of the writer is not to say what we can say but what we are unable to say.
Anaïs Nin
I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.
Molière
I began to love her in my dreams.
Michelle Bidwell
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If you want to be successful, it’s just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing.
Will Rogers
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo.
Don Marquis
A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.
Marianne Moore
I have your review in front of me and soon it will be behind me.
George Bernard Shaw
She was drunk and broke her toe.
Sandra Jensen
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
Norman Mailer
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Resistance, what are you supporting in me?
Bernice Ellis
Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.
Lao Tzu
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
If 12 is a circle then 13 is the spiral when the circle is opened.
Lindsay McLeod Espinoza
It’s better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.
L. P. Hartley
Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
Alfred Hitchcock
I can hardly wait for November to start.
Gabriele Stehle
The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.
Carl Gustav Jung
To listen with everything that I am
For the low sweet tones
Of the coming night
In the last rays of golden sunlight
My heart wanders in the lines and curves
Of the branches overhead
Among the leaves now opened wide
In this moment’s expression
Leaning against the worn trunk
I watch the deepening sky
Spread out like the palm of my hand
Silence courts the field
Even the birds have found stillness
As the stars emerge with their inky partners
To dance to the moon’s song
I find under the cover of oak and evening
My heart emptied out and cradled
In hopes and dreams just imagined
And I realize I have been holding my breath
Waiting for this moment to become
Leigh-Anne Tyson
What is now proved was once only imagined.
William Blake
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.
Oscar Wilde
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
T. S. Eliot
The writing in itself is still literally crap, but I can make it hit like a sledgehammer when I can go back and put all my love and all my heart in.
Pirjo Zeylon
The best method for writing is to do it.
Michael Swerdloff
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
James Thurber
Truly to sing, that is a different breath.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I just wrote.
Leigh-Anne Tyson
Reading is a sort of rewriting.
Jean-Paul Sartre
It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.
Allen Ginsberg
So I’ll stick by this fonting thing.
Sandra Jensen
Apple seed learned me something.
Bernice Ellis
You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.
William Gibson
My right foot is in a cast for the second time this year...don’t ask.
Jody Strimling-Muchow
Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn’t we?
Audra Foveo-Alba
i never think at all when i write
nobody can do two things at the same time
and do them both well
Archy
Suck it in and live it my love, suck it in and live it. We are writers now and there is no turning back.
Bernice Ellis
I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.
Joyce Carol Oates
Now I can smell it too, the cunning 50.
Pirjo Zeylon
Sometimes I feel like a writer.
Michael Swerdloff
My work is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself.
Miguel de Unamuno
I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.
Pearl S. Buck
Are all your stars shining?
JD Salinger
How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.
Mark Twain
Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes.
Benjamin Franklin
I have this day – shall I make it count?
Pirjo Zeylon
Freefall is an extraordinary process, one which has turned many from “I want to be a writer” to being writers.
Sandra Jensen
It has made me the gunman who does not hesitate to draw. I can draw now, anytime.
Pirjo Zeylon
Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
Edna Ferber
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Art is not a handicraft. It is the transmission of a feeling which the artist has experienced.
Leo Tolstoy
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
William Campbell Gault
When you take stuff from one writer, it’s plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it’s research.
William Mizner
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
Elizabeth Drew
The big secret is the ability to stay in the room.
Ron Carlson
Things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.
William Shakespeare
May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second.
Gustave Flaubert
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Edwin Schlossberg
Writing is a crummy profession, but a good hobby.
Paavo Haavikko
In good writing, words become one with things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Novelty disturbs and repels.
Simone de Beauvoir
To my dear children, without whose constant love and affection this book would have been finished in half the time.
P. G. Wodehouse
That’s one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention.
Richard Ford
Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I’d be a politician.
Eugene Ionesco
Take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself.
Lewis Carroll
Since when was genius found respectable?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
When I was sitting writing The Shadow of the Glen I got more aid than any learning would have given me, from a chink in the floor that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.
J. M. Synge
Always do what you are afraid to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
James Thurber
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.
Henry David Thoreau
You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.
Abraham Lincoln
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
William Blake
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
Sinclair Lewis
The subject of all this is not two camels. There is only one lost camel, but language has difficulty saying that.
Rumi
An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners’ names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.
Mignon McLaughlin
Writers don’t need love; all they require is money.
John Osborne
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain
If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you – it will come out of that wall.
Anton Chekhov
Remarks are not literature.
Gertrude Stein
Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters – to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Make the drummer sound good.
Steve Lacy
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis
Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
Paul Valery
If you don’t allow yourself the possibility of writing something very, very bad, it would be hard to write something very good.
Steven Galloway
My entire soul is a cry, and all my work is a commentary on that cry.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Perspective is key.
Lindsay McLeod Espinoza
From the moment I picked up your book till I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.
Groucho Marx
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
W. Somerset Maugham
There are two ways of speaking an audience will always like – one is to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is to tell them what they’re used to.
George Eliot
There’s more of yourself in a book than a play. Ben Jonson murdered people; Marlowe was a spy; Shakespeare just sat in the corner and took notes.
Sir John Mortimer
“That,” I replied cordially, “is what it doesn’t do anything else but.”
P. G. Wodehouse
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau
An economist is a man who knows a hundred ways of making love but doesn’t know any women.
Art Buchwald
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
William Blake
A wounded deer leaps the highest.
Emily Dickinson
Let me walk through the fields of paper, touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
Denise Levertov
If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don’t remove it – I might be writing in my dreams.
Danzae Pace
My relatives say that they are glad I’m rich, but that they simply cannot read me.
Kurt Vonnegut
For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
George Orwell
No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
Stephen King
The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.
Edna Ferber
When you catch an adjective, kill it.
Mark Twain
Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.
Kahlil Gibran
These critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest part of my sincerity. They must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them.
Zane Grey
Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
Donald Hall
Teaching writing is a hustle.
Cormac McCarthy
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books, but lives in our very blood?
Carl Jung
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time. The wait is simply too long.
Leonard Bernstein
Every word written is a victory against death.
Michel Butor
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard Shaw
I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
Emily Dickinson
Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.
Natalie Goldberg
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.
Abraham Lincoln
Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.
Emily Dickinson
Out of a seeming void and dark-winged sleep
Of dim inconscient infinity
A Power arose from the insentient deep,
A flame-whirl of magician Energy.
Sri Aurobindo
What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.
André Gide
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Salman Rushdie
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Herman Melville
It is personalities not principles that move the age.
Oscar Wilde
You have to know the human heart.
Thom Jones
Rule one of reading other people’s stories is that whenever you say ‘well that’s not convincing’ the author tells you that’s the bit that wasn’t made up.
Neil Gaiman
Better is the enemy of good.
Voltaire
New writers are often told, “Write what you know.” I would broaden that by saying, “Write what you know emotionally.”
Marjorie Franco
One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book – give it, give it all, give it now. Some more will arise for later, something better. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
Annie Dillard
Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.
Benjamin Disraeli
The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.
William Blake
I’m nobody, who are you?
Emily Dickinson
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
Oscar Wilde
I am tired. My arm aches. My head boils. My feet are cold. But I am not aware of any weakness.
Zane Grey
A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.
Carlos Castaneda
Watch where you dive, there are rocks where you cannot see them, they can bruise and break your bones without warning. They can also shake off the old layers of skin and fat that are not necessary nor supportive of your journey as writer, friend, lover, or human. So dive, and then dive again and again. The waters are healing and fresh. Go ahead and dive with your eyes closed but open. Dive deeper. The force of the river will carry you to your destination clean, scraped, and scrubbed. Dive deeper.
Michael Swerdloff
You possess a fearsome array of skills and abilities, and the most satisfying of these may be completely unknown to you now.
Chris Baty
I have traveled a path and followed a thought and it has all supported me in my unfolding.
Bernice Ellis
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
Franz Kafka
Books want to be born: I never make them.
Samuel Butler
A book is one of the few havens remaining where your mind can get both provocation and privacy.
Edward P. Morgan
Work is love made visible.
Kahlil Gibran
When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.
Kurt Vonnegut
In a good play, everyone is in the right.
Fredrich Hebbel
By writing much, one learns to write well.
Robert Southey
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth
The only need is the eye to see.
Willa Cather
One day, we were like this first man in the great, stridulant night of the Oyapock. The skin of the world was very vast. To be a man after rediscovering a million years was mysteriously like being something still other than man, a strange, unfinished possibility that could also be all kinds of other things.
Satprem
To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
Oscar Wilde
Don’t sweat the petty things, and don’t pet the sweaty things.
Groucho Marx
The last words I write of a book are very often the first, so it doesn’t much matter how you start.
Raymond Hill
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.
Abraham Lincoln
I’m normally not a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me Superman.
Homer Simpson
Remember tonight, for it is the beginning of always.
Dante Alighieri
The central problem of novel-writing is causality.
Jorge Luis Borges
While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
Lewis Carroll
Write a page a day. It will add up.
Herman Wouk
I must go deeper and even stronger into my treasure mine and stint nothing of time, toil, or torture.
Zane Grey
Write from the soul. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.
Jeffrey A. Carver
There are four stages in a marriage. First there’s the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
Norman Mailer
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
William Butler Yeats
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.
Oscar Levant
Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.
James Dean
Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?
Friedrich Nietzsche
What’s the product that is imbued with the most value, and the most meaning, and is the most important thing in the world? Without a doubt, that is books.
Emma Barnes
Self-confidence can be crippling.
Leonard Michaels
All good books will eventually find a publisher if the writer tries hard enough, and a central secret to writing a good book is to write on that which people like you will enjoy. Write what you care about and understand.
Richard North Patterson
No tale tells all.
Alexei Panshin
I always write about my own experiences, whether I’ve had them or not.
Ron Carlson
‘It is only a woman’s cookery, to be sure,’ he said, toying with a chocolate mousse, ‘and I do not know that I should trust her with game, but within these wide limits, how very good it is! She must be a knowing old soul, with great experience, no doubt in excellent service before the Revolution. Perhaps something of a slut: your amiable slut makes the best of cooks.’
Patrick O’Brian
Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.
John Gardner
There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
James Baldwin
There fell into my hands a gilded book, very old and large, which cost me only two florins. It was not made of paper or parchment as other books are, but of admirable rinds, as it seemed to me, of young trees. The book contained thrice seven leaves, so numbered at the top of each folio, every seventh leaf having painted images and figures instead of writing. On the first of these seven leaves there was depicted a virgin who was being swallowed by serpents; on the second a Cross upon which a serpent was crucified; on the last a wilderness watered by many fair fountains, out of which came a number of serpents.
Nicholas Flamel
When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
Neil Gaiman
In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers – to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.
Shirley Ann Grau
The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
Cynthia Ozick
Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.
Homer Simpson
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Henry David Thoreau
Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.
Emily Dickinson
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
J. G. Ballard
The doer alone learneth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Beauty awakens the soul to act.
Dante Alighieri
No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It seems so calculating.
Oscar Wilde
Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.
Pablo Neruda
The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.
William Blake
God wasn’t too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.
John Barth
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I don’t know exactly how it’s done. I let it alone a good deal.
Saul Bellow
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.
Richard Wilbur
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
William Faulkner
Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.
Ray Bradbury
Style, like the human body, is especially beautiful when the veins are not prominent and the bones cannot be counted.
Tacitus
The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
Anthony Burgess
Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say.
Edgar A. Poe
Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life.
James Norman Hall
As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.
Carolyn Kizer
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot
You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft.
Phyllis A. Whitney
Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil – but there is no way around them.
Isaac Asimov
An essential element for good writing is a good ear.
Barbara Tuchman
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Stephen King
I wrote a few children’s books – not on purpose.
Steven Wright
Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn’t every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin, speaking one’s conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?
Roland Barthes
No tale is so good but can be spoilt in the telling.
Terence
If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
Meister Eckhart
Storytelling reveals meaning without defining it.
Hannah Arendt
There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons
That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes.
Emily Dickinson
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
Jorge Luis Borges
Without music, life would be a mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.
Lao Tzu
He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.
Benjamin Franklin
You have no enemy except yourselves.
St. Francis of Assisi
The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.
Leonardo da Vinci
I’ve always wondered if there was a god. And now I know there is – and it’s me.
Homer Simpson
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
Lewis Carroll
In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, and to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings satisfactions, is a curious anticlimax.
Alfred Kazin
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
Humour is the kindly contemplation of the incongruous.
P. G. Wodehouse
Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
Raymond Chandler
Screenwriters? Schmucks with Underwoods.
Jack Warner
If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.
May Sarton
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If you want to lose your faith, make friends with a priest.
G. I. Gurdjieff
They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.
Marquis de Sade
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham
What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
There are things known, there are things unknown, in between are doors.
Jim Morrison
Everything popular is wrong.
Oscar Wilde
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
Edgar Allen Poe
Never confuse movement with action.
Ernest Hemingway
To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.
William Shakespeare
I have one major rule: everybody is right.
Ken Wilber
A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiousity and bewilderment.
William Trevor
The human race is the basis on which heaven is founded.
Emanuel Swedenborg
An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant howls. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his howls on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.
H. L. Mencken
It is meaningless to complain. What’s important from this point on is the strategy of your life.
Carlos Castaneda
Writing is both mask and unveiling.
E. B. White
Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
Paul Auster
Only write from your own passion, your own truth. That’s the only thing you really know about, and anything else leads you away from the pulse.
Marianne Williamson
First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
Ray Bradbury
The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Mary Heaton Vorse
Someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven. I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.
Harold Brodkey
An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
Charles de Montesquieu
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
Ursula K. LeGuin
When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Anaïs Nin
Artists and poets must find the light in which they can find themselves.
Frances Kelly
I try to envision the story as a silent movie before I start adding dialogue.
John Sayles
Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists so that the character has someplace to stand. Plot exists so the character can discover what he is really like, forcing the character to choice and action. And theme exists only to make the character stand up and be somebody.
John Gardner
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
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Will cannot be quenched against its will.
Dante Alighieri
When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.
Abraham Lincoln
Words cannot express things;
Speech does not convey the spirit.
Swayed by words, one is lost;
Blocked by phrases, one is bewildered.
The oak tree in the garden.
Once you see it, dreams fade away.
Mumon
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
W. Somerset Maugham
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
They do not grasp how being at variance it agrees with itself, a backward-turning adjustment like that of the bow or lyre.
Heraclitus
“It’s money and adventure and fame! It’s the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o’clock tomorrow!”
James Creelman and Ruth Rose
Unless you enter the tiger’s den, you cannot take the cubs.
Japanese proverb
Why is language most efficacious when it says one thing through meaning another?
Jacques Lacan
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Unknown
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
Anthony Burgess
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William Blake
Trouble shadows the Home Tribe. You hear its call. The land is barren, and someone must go beyond. A figure emerges from the campfire smoke, an elder pointing to you. You have been chosen as Seeker. You will venture your life so the greater life of the Home Tribe may go on.
Christopher Vogler
The “path” comes into existence only when we observe it.
Heisenberg
Goose, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an “author,” there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl’s thought and feeling.
Ambrose Bierce
A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
Eugene Ionesco
A novelist is a person who lives in other people’s skins.
E. L. Doctorow
Every word born of an inner necessity.
Etty Hillesum
Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather, and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know.
John Keats
A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.
Joyce Cary
I am irritated by my own writing.
Gustave Flaubert
The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty.
Edmund Gosse
The writer must have a more than ordinary capacity for life.
Paul Engle
Our high respect for a well-read person is praise enough for literature.
T. S. Eliot
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite o’er-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania, sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.
William Shakespeare
There’s no such thing beneath the heavens as conditions favorable to art. Art must crash through or perish.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
Joseph Joubert
The fact is that all time is simultaneous. In a simultaneous time, punishment makes no sense. The punishment as an event and the event for which you are being punished exist at once; and since there is no past, present and future, you could just as well say that the punishment came first.
Seth
Humbly receiving death and life, to hell I release all claim, and with new eyes see my eternal love – leaving.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Benjamin Franklin
Publication is the auction of the Mind of Man.
Emily Dickinson
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Read a lot, finding out what kind of writing turns you on, in order to develop a criterion for your own writing. And then trust it – and yourself.
Rosemary Daniell
Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.
Elizabeth Bowen
There are some books that refuse to be written. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.
Mark Twain
Load every rift with ore.
John Keats
Literature is the rediscovery of childhood.
Georges Bataille
The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.
Rachel Carson
A man’s work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus
Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.
Emily Dickinson
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
Dr Samuel Johnson
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Jorge Luis Borges
He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much.
Lao Tzu
Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts.
Jim Morrison
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
André Gide
Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
W. Somerset Maugham
My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
Karl Kraus
When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside. It isn’t like that at all. It may be more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there’s a great, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent.
Alan Garner
There are times when quantity is at least as important as quality in learning an art.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
Thomas Jefferson
Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else. Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?
Eudora Welty
Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.
Erasmus
There are worse crimes than burning books. One is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola
Even though stories abound in my culture, we have no word for fiction. The only way I could get across the Western concept of fiction was to associate fiction with telling lies.
Malidoma Patrick Some
It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it is such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.
Ernest Hemingway
Energy is eternal delight.
William Blake
You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.
Timothy Leary
A full tide and a warm wind,
A wish to set my home,
If freedom dreamed belongs to me,
It sails upon the foam.
Child of the extremes,
You learn the lessons slow,
You cover many traveled turns
And build the unclaimed road.
A path taught to me yesterday
May still inside me glow,
But farther out upon the way
A footstep never shows.
Scott Jeffries
Where we go now is new.
Bernice Ellis
Learning is also important for the warrior in times of peace.
Budoshoshinshu
The brain has a tendency toward chronic blaming.
Dr. Paul Pearsall
If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you have men who will deal likewise with their fellow man.
St. Francis of Assisi
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
James Joyce
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Create
Become
Leigh-Anne Tyson
Waste my heart on fear no more.
John O’Donohue
It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.
Gustave Flaubert
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
Gilbert Highet
Why dance the praise? So the words can be formed in the motion of the body. So the spirit emerges from the very cauldron, the heat and fire of the self. For the reason that some writers always use a pen for various drafts, rather than a machine, the better to feel the physical intimacy of the event of writing.
Deena Metzger
Beliefs may need to be restructured rather than denied.
Jane Roberts
It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
John Ruskin
I would rather be ashes than dust.
Jack London
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
W. Somerset Maugham
A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Samuel Johnson
You have all the scenes. Just go home and word it in.
Samuel Goldwyn
The job of the critic is to report to us his moods.
Oscar Wilde
Good prose is like a windowpane.
George Orwell
What the font?
Leigh-Anne Tyson
The principles of Truth are Seven; he who knows them possesses the magic key before whose touch all doors of the temple fly open.
The Kybalion
Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?
Robert A. Heinlein
There’s no secret to success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn’t tell you all about it?
Kin Hubbard
I stake my destiny upon hours of uninterrupted work.
Charles Baudelaire
The pageant of the riverbank had marched steadily along. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant tangled locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset cloud, was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin.
Kenneth Grahame
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.
Ernest Hemingway
I had discovered, early in my researches, that their hermetic doctrine was no mere chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself.
W. B. Yeats
From time immemorial artistic insights have been revealed to artists in their sleep and in dreams, so that at all times they ardently desired them.
Paracelsus
The shot will go smoothly only when it takes the archer himself by surprise.
Eugene Herrigel
Industry need not wish.
Benjamin Franklin
Joking is teaching. Don’t be fooled by the lightness or the vulgarity. Jokes are serious.
Rumi
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.
Leonardo da Vinci
Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.
Frederic Raphael
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
Ernest Hemingway
One becomes two, two becomes three, and by means of the third and fourth achieves unity; thus two are but one. Invert nature and you will find that what you seek. Join the male and the female, and you will find what is sought.
Maria the Jewess
The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
J. Krishnamurti
You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.
Gene Wolfe
Where’s your will to be weird?
Jim Morrison
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It’s delightful to distort size, to see something that’s tiny as though it were vast.
Robert Morgan
Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.
Zane Grey
The brain is wider than the sky.
Emily Dickinson
For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.
William Blake
All my life, I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver
It would not be better if things happened just as men wish.
Heraclitus
Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Marge, don’t discourage the boy! Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals. Except the weasel.
Homer Simpson
It is a greater joy to see the author’s author, than himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Still no response from my editor in New York. Almost two months now since I sent back the manuscript. There are problems, I saw today, but nothing insurmountable. It’s the other thing, this silence, that sits on my chest and crushes the breath out of me.
Bill Barich
Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don’t write them down.
W. B. Kinsella
A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
Kahlil Gibran
Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Theodore Dreiser
Make it new.
Ezra Pound
We are the species that clamors to be lied to.
Joyce Carol Oates
The power of the symbol comes from the nature of perception and thought. The train whistle makes us see the train, the footstep in the hall reminds us of the family relative.
Delmore Schwartz
A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke.
Scott Spencer
The usual way – through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent.
Danielle Steel
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
Herman Melville
Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.
Sid Caesar
I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes – but is that all?
Walt Whitman
What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.
A. A. Milne
What is really beautiful must always be true.
Stendhal
I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.
Jonathan Winters
Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
John Irving
Develop any other skill; turn to any other branch of knowledge; learn how to use your hands. Try woodworking, bird watching, gardening, mushrooming, cooking, fishing, sailing, weaving, pottery, zoology, astronomy, cosmology, take your pick. Whatever activity you engage in as trade or hobby, or field of study, will tone up your body and clear your head. At the very least, it will help you with your metaphors.
Stanley Kunitz
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
E. B. White
The proper study of mankind is books.
Aldous Huxley
Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it. You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.
Will Rogers
When one eye is fixed upon your destination, there is only one eye left with which to find the way.
Japanese proverb
It is better to create than to learn. Creating is the essence of life.
Julius Caesar
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.
Walt Whitman
Every writer at some point must go through an analytical period, but in time he must get his own characteristic solutions into his blood, so that when confronted by a problem in a novel he’s writing he does not consult his literary background. He feels his way to the solution.
John Gardner
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is no measure or limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of filthy lucre and gain.
Martin Luther
In art, economy is always beauty.
Henry James
Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
E. L. Doctorow
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I can make more generals, but horses cost money.
Abraham Lincoln
A true friend stabs you in the front.
Oscar Wilde
The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
Jorge Luis Borges
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.
Gurdjieff
Have common sense and stick to the point.
W. Somerset Maugham
Truth is in things, and not in words.
Herman Melville
Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
Walt Whitman
One can acquire everything in solitude – except character.
Stendhal
The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Marcus Aurelius
Transmute yourselves from deadstones into living philosophical stones.
Gerhardt Dorn
You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for – if you are honest – you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.
P. L. Travers
There is no blue without yellow and without orange.
Vincent Van Gogh
Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.
Jane Roberts
Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.
Charles Dickens
If you write well, you don’t have to dress funny.
James Dickey
Then what is writing of quality? To know how to thrust your head into the darkness, know how to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is basically a dangerous calling.
Roberto Bolaño
Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.
A. A. Milne
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
Walt Whitman
Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.
Marcus Aurelius
A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
Benjamin Franklin
Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Anybody can be good in the country.
Oscar Wilde
Nature is a temple where living columns
Let slip from time to time uncertain words;
Man finds his way through forests of symbols
Which regard him with familiar gazes.
Charles Baudelaire
Fear is the mind-killer.
Frank Herbert
Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”
Wislawa Szymborska
The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If the stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory.
Barry Lopez
All a publisher has to do is write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deserving and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work.
P. G. Wodehouse
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
Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.
Charles Dickens
In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.
H. P. Lovecraft
I want you to be everything that’s you, deep at the center of your being.
Confucius
Becoming is the mode of activity of the uncreate deity.
Helena P. Blavatsky
The Lord of Delphi neither speaks nor remains silent; but he speaks in symbols.
Heraclitus
Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Writing is the supreme solace.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.
Marquis de Sade
Dwell in possibility.
Emily Dickinson
Books can only reveal us to ourselves.
Henry David Thoreau
I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course it rarely ends that way.
Kashua Ishigura
That’s the essential goal of the writer: you slice out a piece of yourself and slap it down on the desk in front of you.
Stephen Leigh
The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel, the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
William Faulkner
One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.
D. H. Lawrence
Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.
Arthur Schoenhauer
By far the greatest thing is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others. It is a sign of genius, for a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of similarity among dissimilars.
Aristotle
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
Vincent Van Gogh
If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
John Dos Passos
If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.
P. L. Travers
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
Flannery O’Connor
Art is the objectification of feeling.
Herman Melville
Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow.
Paracelsus
Water is the driving force of all nature.
Leonardo da Vinci
An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.
Lao Tzu
Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.
Anthony Trollope
Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty.
St. Francis of Assisi
People are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Myth hovers in the shadows of fairy tales.
Deena Metzger
A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.
Mark Twain
What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.
Logan Pearsall Smith
It’s much more important to write than to be written about.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Never save anything for your next book.
Tam Mossman
I accept Time absolutely.
Walt Whitman
It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.
W. Somerset Maugham
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.
Benjamin Franklin
What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and before the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him.
E. M. Forster
If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one: he is looking on at the suicide of his own talent.
Honore de Balzac
Inside every fat book is a thin book trying to get out.
Unknown
You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you’ve had a reason to do so.
Hans Hoffman
God writes a lot of comedy. Trouble is, he’s stuck with so many bad actors who don’t know how to play funny.
Garrison Keillor
I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
E. B. White
The novel is an event in consciousness. The novelist is inviting readers to watch a performance in their own brain.
George Buchanan
The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.
William Wordsworth
A stale article, if you dip it in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you’ve scowled upon.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.
Michel de Montaigne
To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it.
Elizabeth I
Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.
Charles Baudelaire
I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
Vincent Van Gogh
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?
Vita Sackville-West
The road that is walked in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than a road trod in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
I think it’s bad to talk about one’s present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Norman Mailer
An observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to those who sneer at the use of coincidence in fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences.
Rafael Sabatini
However great a man’s natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Maybe, just once, someone will call me ‘Sir’ without adding, ‘You’re making a scene.’
Homer Simpson
If you’re looking for messages, try Western Union.
Ernest Hemingway
You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.
Les Brown
If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been waiting all along.
Joseph Campbell
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
William Butler Yeats
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
Oscar Wilde
When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.
Lao Tzu
Sometimes the guide is as mysterious as the psychopomp Hermes, who leads the souls of the dead into the underworld, or as formidable as Virgil, who led Dante into the realms of hell; sometimes she is a wondrous as the appearance of an angel or as disturbing as the odd creature at the crossroads whom we were lucky enough to befriend and thereby earned a gift – the cloak of invisibility, the magic password, the sleeping potion without which we cannot cross over to or survive on the other side.
Deena Metzger
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And shares the nature of infinity.
William Wordsworth
Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people – if only they’d stop writing.
Laura Miller
Did it happen? No. Is it true? Yes.
Ron Carlson
Men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars.
H. P. Lovecraft
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Marcus Aurelius
Know the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.
Herman Melville
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Aldous Huxley
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today.
James Joyce
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
Henry David Thoreau
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
Samuel Johnson
Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
W. Somerset Maugham
I have a theory of my own about what the art of the novel is, and how it came into being. It happens because the storyteller’s own experience has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.
Lady Murasaki
Draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.
Michelangelo
When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
Anatole France
I don’t take drugs, I take books.
Ingeborg Bachmann
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
Robert Heinlein
My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.
John D. MacDonald
Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.
Paracelsus
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.
Orson Scott Card
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant
I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I write and I understand.
Chinese proverb
Writers have an island, a center of refuge, within themselves. It is the mind’s anchorage, the soul’s Great Good Place.
Wright Morris
In change things rest.
Heraclitus
If I ever get real rich, I hope I’m not mean to poor people, like I am now.
Jack Handy
The Philosopher’s Stone is called the most ancient, secret or unknown, natural, incomprehensible, heavenly, blessed, sacred Stone of the Sages. It is described as being true, more certain than certainty itself, the arcanum of all arcana – the Divine virtue which is hidden from the foolish, the aim and end of all things under heaven, the wonderful epilogue or conclusion of all the labours of the Sages – the perfect essence of all the elements, the indestructible body which no element can injure, the quintessence; the double and living mercury which has in itself the heavenly spirit – the cure for all unsound and imperfect metals – the everlasting light – the panacea for all diseases – the glorious Phœnix – the most precious of treasures – the chief good of Nature – the universal triune Stone, which is naturally composed of three things, and, nevertheless, is but one – nay, is generated and brought forth of one, two, three, four, and five.
The Sophic Hydrolith
The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.
Max Ernst
Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There ain’t much credit in that.
Charles Dickens
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves “It’s pretty, but is it Art?”
Rudyard Kipling
You cannot open a book without learning something.
Confucius
I felt a cleavage in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.
Emily Dickinson
What is the subconscious to every other person, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, the muse.
Ray Bradbury
Only he who can be can do.
Gurdjieff
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
Flannery O’Connor
The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.
Mickey Spillane
I can’t think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Thomas Mann
Try to be one on whom nothing is lost.
Henry James
Writing is communication, not self-expression.
Richard Peck
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
There is in a word something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire
Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.
Confucius
Fundamental accuracy is the sole morality of writing.
Ezra Pound
You could tell it was classical music, because the banjo players were leaning back and chewing gum; and in New York restaurants only death or a classical specality can stop banjoists.
P. G. Wodehouse
I sent ‘The World Well Lost’ to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.
Theodore Sturgeon
The writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads.
Dr Seuss
Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.
Marquis de Sade
There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret.
H. P. Lovecraft
Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
Flannery O’Connor
You can’t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you.
A. A. Milne
She was looking more and more like an aunt than anything human.
P. G. Wodehouse
There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.
Charles Dickens
He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
My interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time.
Carlos Castaneda
Think no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, and you will never write a best-selling novel.
Dan Bennett
God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.
Stendhal
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Aldous Huxley
It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.
St. Francis of Assisi
One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I love my work but do not know how I write it.
Zane Grey
Common-looking people are the best in the world. That is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.
Abraham Lincoln
The ideas aren’t that important. Really they aren’t. Everyone’s got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.
Neil Gaiman
On most writers, the earmarks of thrift, if not outright povery, are evident.
Joyce Thompson
And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
William Shakespeare
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be the beginning.
Louis L’Amour
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
William James
The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.
The Necronomicon
He said true things, but called them by the wrong names.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
People can die of mere imagination.
Geoffrey Chaucer
When night darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.
John Milton
Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive.
George Washington
The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.
Jackson Pollock
For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.
James M. Barrie
He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!
Emily Dickinson
We are trying to create a world in the imagination from which to draw the kinds of experiences we need in order to realize our possibilities.
Deena Metzger
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
Michel de Montaigne
Basically, fiction is people. You can’t write fiction about ideas.
Theodore Sturgeon
The best way to know God is to love many things.
Vincent Van Gogh
Speak ill of no man, but speak all the good you know of everybody.
Benjamin Franklin
Nature is not human-hearted.
Lao Tzu
One who has not had a good father must create one.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What is the price of experience? It is bought with the price of all a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
William Blake
Every burned book enlightens the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.
James M. Barrie
To begin, begin.
William Wordsworth
Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius. He who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.
William Godwin
Even if what you’re working on doesn’t go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you’re doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.
Cormac McCarthy
No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
Confucius
Some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
H. P. Lovecraft
The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.
Flannery O’Connor
Ideas are but approximations. To the gods, our ideas are children’s toys.
Heraclitus
If you could get up the courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed.
David Viscott
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I myself become the wounded person.
Walt Whitman
The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing.
Ken MacLeod
I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.
Carson McCullers
The book should act as a window to the word.
Harry Duncan
Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life.
William James
Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!
John Milton
When you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.
Jackson Pollock
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I feel I’ve certainly been lucky to find a publisher who seems so interested generally in his authors.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
O son, how many bodies have we to pass through, how many bands of demons, through how many series of repetitions and cycles of the stars, before we hasten to the One alone?
Hermes Trismegistus
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
Leonardo da Vinci
If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is.
Henry David Thoreau
Pessimist: one who, when he has a choice between two evils, chooses both.
Oscar Wilde
Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end.
Ernest Hemingway
Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me.
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
Emily Dickinson
Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.
Paul Schrader
You have to have that feeling of “I’ll show them.” If you don’t have it, don’t become a writer. It’s part of the animal, it’s primitive, but if you don’t want to rise above the crowd, forget it.
Leon Uris
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann
The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life.
Norbet Platt
A writer: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.
John K. Hutchens
What I don’t write is as important as what I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak.
Louisa May Alcott
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
Louis L’Amour
He lives most life whoever breathes most air.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If you are a genius, you’ll make your own rules, but if not – and the odds are against it – go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper.
J. B. Priestley
I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.
William James
I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.
Lord Byron
There must be room in love for hate.
Molly Peacock
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
Cicero
Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you.
Santha Rama Rau
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
Lord Byron
With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.
William Wordsworth
A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.
Charles Dickens
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
G. K. Chesterton
When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven, as it were, and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him.
Paracelsus
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Henry David Thoreau
Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.
Camille Paglia
Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
Max Ernst
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
Pablo Picasso
The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Those with “something to fall back on” invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it.
David Mamet
At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.
Nelson Algren
Fiction is an act of revenge.
John Hawkes
Any ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books, and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
Nelson Algren
To imagine yourself inside another person is what a story writer does in every piece of work. It is his first step, and his last too.
Eudora Welty
If you really want to hurt your parents and don’t have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.
Kurt Vonnegut
Education, properly understood, is that which teaches discernment.
Joseph Roux
Don’t mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion – many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.
Stanley Schmidt
Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
When a man’s knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.
Herbert Spencer
The only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
Brenda Ueland
From reading too much, and sleeping too little, his brain dried up on him and he lost his judgment.
Miguel de Cervantes
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
Ayn Rand
Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Aldous Huxley
The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.
Lao Tzu
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
Gore Vidal
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. Most believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather
Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.
Homer
Everything stinks till it’s finished.
Dr Seuss
Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.
Confucius
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing
I wish they would only take me as I am.
Vincent Van Gogh
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
Walt Whitman
The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I’m not a teacher, but an awakener.
Robert Frost
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
William Zinsser
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
Oscar Wilde
Everything that suffers is sensible; everything that is sensible, suffereth.
The Divine Pymander
I am not discouraged because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.
Thomas Edison
Without a gentle contempt for education, no man’s education is complete.
G. K. Chesterton
Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
Camille Paglia
Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense and spelling. More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful.
J.R.R. Tolkien
There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.
Charles Dickens
Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.
Benjamin Franklin
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
Abraham Lincoln
The novel is likely, if the best literary brains cannot be induced to return to it, to survive in some perfunctory, despised and hopelessly degenerate form, like modern tombstones, or the Punch and Judy show.
George Orwell
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.
William Faulkner
Who are you going to believe – me, or your own eyes?
Groucho Marx
It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible. Do not then be afraid of defeat.
Henry Ward Beecher
No time for poetry but exactly what is.
Jack Kerouac
It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
Willa Cather
Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute.
Franklin P. Adams
Any story takes place in the landscape of the imagination.
Stef Penney
Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
John Campbell
To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself.
Mark Twain
You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them. The great charm of all power is modesty.
Louisa May Alcott
There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write.
Mignon McLaughlin
A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
William James
The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
The naming of what is there is what is important.
Ian McEwan
Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.
James M. Barrie
The Principle of Rhythm embodies this truth: that in everything there is manifested a measured motion; a to-and-from movement; a flow and inflow; a swing forward and backward; a pendulum-like movement between opposing energies.
The Kybalion
Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
John Maynard Keynes
To feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perception, making new and unheard-of effects with words. That is writing as I feel it, a kind of significant living.
Richard Wright
It is not inspiration; it is expiration.
Jean Cocteau
Close the door.
Barbara Kingsolver
Plausibility is the morality of fiction.
Edith Mirrilees
Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.
Herbert Spencer
I don’t like work, but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself.
Joseph Conrad
Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.
H. P. Lovecraft
The object of art is to give life a shape.
William Shakespeare
America is essentially a woman’s country – why shouldn’t the leading novelists be women?
Henry Miller
All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.
Thomas Wolfe
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
Nadine Gordimer
You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.
William E. Gladstone
When we sit down each day and do our work. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings.
Steven Pressfield
Realists do not fear the results of their study.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
God has entrusted me with myself.
Epictetus
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.
Aleister Crowley
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
William Shakespeare
Every man is the son of his own works.
Miguel de Cervantes
When I think about all the crap I learned in high school it’s a wonder I can think at all.
Paul Simon
The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.
P. G. Wodehouse
All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I.
Louis L’Amour
Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.
William Blake
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
Beatrix Potter
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Tom Wolfe
My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due – she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
E. M. Forster
Nothing is proved, all is permitted.
Theodore Dreiser
Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
W. C. Fields
To be energetic and authentic, a national literature includes dialogues with the despised. Equally, our own writing wants to be infused with the dark light from our underworlds.
Deena Metzger
Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
Frank Herbert
In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins.
Ulysses S. Grant
Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.
Andy Warhol
It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking. It can do no other. In ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.
Franz Kafka
I write to escape; to escape poverty.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
The imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
William James
Do what you can with what you have, where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt
It is easy to finish things. Nothing is simpler. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.
Toulouse Lautrec
We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Henry James
I’m not funny. What I am is brave.
Lucille Ball
He who is only just is cruel.
Lord Byron
A troop of porcupines is milling about on a cold winter’s day. In order to keep from freezing, the animals move closer together. Just as they are close enough to huddle, however, they start to poke each other with their quills. In order to stop the pain, they spread out, lose the advantage of commingling, and begin to shiver. This sends them back in search of each other, and the cycle repeats as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
Henry David Thoreau
Let us not make arbitrary conjectures about the greatest matters.
Heraclitus
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.
James M. Barrie
Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.
Camille Paglia
The more particular, the more specific you are, the more universal you are.
Nancy Hale
I wake up every morning determined both to change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day a little difficult.
E. B. White
I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
Aleister Crowley
My aim is to put down what I see in the best and simplest way.
Ernest Hemingway
If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.
Epictetus
A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
Lord Byron
Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake.
W. C. Fields
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
E. M. Forster
There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is seeing something that isn’t there.
Thomas Hardy
I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.
Joseph Conrad
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
Alice Munro
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T. S. Eliot
Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.
Ursula Le Guin
Don’t say the old lady screamed – bring her on and let her scream.
Mark Twain
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
William Makepeace Thackeray
Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill.
W. C. Fields
Why don’t you come into my garden? I would like my roses to see you.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
I’m a holy man minus the holiness.
E. M. Forster
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
John Steinbeck
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only thing I can say that is not bullshit is that you do have to learn to write in a way that you would learn to play the violin. Everybody seems to think that you should be able to turn on the faucet one day and out will come the novel. I think for most people it’s just practice, practice, practice, that sense of just learning your instrument until – when you have an idea on the violin, you don’t have to translate it into violin-speak anymore – the language is your own. It’s not something you can think your way into, or outsmart. you’ve just got to do it.
Kevin Canty
When I’m writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.
Anne Rice
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin.
Kahlil Gibran
Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling and good expression; it is having wit, soul and taste, all together.
George-Louis Leclerc
Nothing can come of nothing.
William Shakespeare
The bones connected by joints are at once one and several. To agree is to differ, the harmony is the discord. From the particulars come oneness, from oneness the particulars.
Heraclitus
There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
Jessamyn West
If you wish to be a writer, write.
Epictetus
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horizon your goal; it will always be ahead of you.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
Joseph Conrad
Not every man can see the truth, but he can be it.
Franz Kafka
The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
Andy Warhol
Writing for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. Children you only need to tell things to once.
Diana Wynne Jones
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can’t touch.
E. M. Forster
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Marcel Proust
God gave us memory so we might have roses in December.
James M. Barrie
I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
Vincent Van Gogh
Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.
Miguel De Cervantes
If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
William James
When I say artist I mean the man who is building things. It’s all a big game of construction – some with a brush – some with a shovel – some choose a pen.
Jackson Pollock
It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Your writing is trying to tell you something.
Joanne Greenberg
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Robert Benchley
The virtue of books is to be readable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No matter what the subject, the subject is always love.
Ingrid Bengis
Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.
Lewis Carroll
Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.
Jane Austen
They said this mystery never shall cease:
The priest promotes war, and the soldier peace.
William Blake
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.
Herman Hesse
To tell the truth is a very difficult thing; and young people are rarely capable of it.
Leo Tolstoy
If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.
Tom Lehrer
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
E. M. Forster
Love is life’s reward, rewarded in rewarding.
Herbert Spencer
Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.
Theodore Roethke
Bring my goat.
Porgy
Words derive their power from the original word.
Meister Eckhart
Books are not meant to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means.
Umberto Eco
Many that live deserve death and many that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be so quick to deal out death and judgement, for even the very wise cannot see all ends.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
Franz Kafka
Carpe per diem – seize the check.
Robin Williams
I have tried to do what is true and not ideal.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
The energy of divine fire shines forth voluntarily and in common, and being self-invoked and self-energetic, energizes through all things with invariable sameness, both through the natures which impart and those that are able to receive its light. This mode of solution, therefore, is far superior, which does not suppose that divine works are effected through contrariety, or discrepance, in the way in which generated natures are usually produced; but asserts that every such work is rightly accomplished through sameness, union, and consent.
Iamblichus On The Mysteries
The poet shall shall know that the ground is always ready-ploughed and manured. Others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches and shall master all attachment.
Walt Whitman
Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.
Vince Lombardi
Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
Umberto Eco
When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.
William Makepeace Thackeray
If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
James Baldwin
Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn.
William Shakespeare
I deny nothing, but doubt everything.
Lord Byron
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
Joseph Conrad
When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.
Andy Warhol
If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Inspiration is the act of drawing up a chair to the writing desk.
Unknown
Art, it seems to me, should simplify, so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Willa Cather
I left nearly all my business to an agent. I am still encumbered with his slovenly and disadvantageous agreements.
H. G. Wells
It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen, to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn’t advance the story.
Frank Yerby
The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
Samuel Johnson
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
Mary Shelley
Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart.
Rainer Maria Rilke
In the middle of my life’s walk
I found myself in a dark wood,
For the straight road was lost.
Dante Alighieri
Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It’s literary suicide.
Erma Bombeck
Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.
Frank Herbert
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
E. M. Forster
No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.
William E. Gladstone
The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
Vincent Van Gogh
Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.
Walter Savage Landor
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.
T. S. Eliot
Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men’s judgments of one another.
Erasmus
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.
Peter Carey
Tobacco had nowhere been forbidden in the Bible, but then it had not yet been discovered, and had probably only escaped proscription for this reason.
Samuel Butler
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
William James
Dreams must be heeded and accepted. For a great many of them come true.
Paracelsus
My painting does not come from the easel.
Jackson Pollock
Biography lends to death a new terror.
Oscar Wilde
The writer’s intention hasn’t anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn’t matter in the end. Just what comes out.
Lillian Hellman
I have learned a great deal from listening carefully.
Ernest Hemingway
There is no try. There is only do or do not.
Yoda
In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.
Theodore Roosevelt
It’s under Edit.
Claire Born
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
Meister Eckhart
To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of.
Elizabeth Gilbert
A writer without sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
Joseph Conrad
Dare and the world yields.
William Makepeace Thackeray
It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.
W. C. Fields
One of the things that happens to careers out here is that people destroy themselves because they begin to think they’re wonderful. They begin to think they know what they’re doing, and the minute that happens, it’s over.
William Goldman
Jests that give pain are no jests.
Miguel de Cervantes
Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive.
Ayn Rand
A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
Herman Melville
Thunderbolt is at the helm.
Heraclitus
A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.
Benjamin Franklin
Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety.
Trevor Nunn
Somewhere in his journals Dostoyevsky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pray and dig away long enough, and lo! soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
Saul Bellow
Sure, it’s simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up.
Ursula K. LeGuin
From two waters make one, whereby seek to make the sun and moon. Prepare to drink the wine of the antagonists. And you shall see with the Dead. Thereupon, make watery earth. And multiply the stone.
The Splendor Solis
Be a fool on the page. Step off the cliff.
Deena Metzger
Talent can’t be taught, but it can be awakened.
Wallace Stegner
I paint things as they are. I don’t comment.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.
William James
‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gymbal in the wabe:
All mimsey were the borogroves,
And the momes rath outgrabe.
Lewis Carrol
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
Rachel Carson
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.
Geoffrey Chaucer
I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.
J. D. Salinger
You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.
Robin Williams
Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.
Lord Byron
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
E. M. Forster
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
William Shakespeare
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
Nadine Gordimer
The world nourishes bodies, the spirit nourishes souls.
Hermes Trismegistus
In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.
Miguel de Cervantes
Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.
Camille Paglia
Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.
W. Somerset Maugham
Really to pray, one must want nothing.
Meister Eckhart
The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.
August Wilson
A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.
W. C. Fields
If a man has talent and can’t use it, he’s failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.
Thomas Wolfe
Do the things you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know.
Louisa May Alcott
Belief creates the actual fact.
William James
When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.
Jackson Pollock
It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
Confucius
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
Oscar Wilde
You contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?
Walt Whitman
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon named Night
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule,
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space – out of Time.
Edgar Allen Poe
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Herman Melville
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T. S. Eliot
I’m not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.
A. N. Wilson
Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head.
Mike Rich
Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say.
Francoise Sagan
The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.
Franz Kafka
The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.
Aleister Crowley
If you want to reveal something, you need to hide it properly first.
Colin Greenland
It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.
Epictetus
Revision, once well done, becomes a sort of automatic itch which you scratch in the next work without thinking about it.
Romulus Linney
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Of course one should not drink much, but often.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me.
Jack London
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.
Jack Handy
To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.
Rachel Carson
Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
Jane Austen
The human spirit is so great a thing that no man can express it; could we rightly comprehend the mind of man nothing would be impossible to us upon the earth.
Paracelcus
Great writers are the saints for the godless.
Anita Brookner
Gentiles are people who eat mayonnaise for no reason.
Robin Williams
I try to work every day, even when I’m not motivated.
Mel Ramos
The main question to a novel is – did it amuse? It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.
Sydney Smith
If I were a girl, I should be still in my first innocence. If I were a woman, I should always be giving birth in my soul to the eternal word. If I were a husband, I should put up a stiff resistance to all evil. If I were a wife, I should keep faith with my dear one, whom I married. If I were a widow, I should be always longing for the one I loved. If I were a virgin, I should be reverently devout. If I were a servant maid, in humility I should count myself lower than God or any creature; and if I were a manservant, I should be hard at work, always serving my Lord with my whole heart. But since of all these I am neither one, I am just a something among somethings, and so I go.
Meister Eckhart
I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.
Dorothy Parker
Tap into what you don’t want to say. Tap into that secret place, despite the agony, despite the personal pain, over and above the fatigue.
Arthur Penn
None of the writing is easy, but I no longer refuse to do it for fear that I’ll fail to get it right. It can never be right, I know; it can only be done.
Nancy Mairs
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.
Arthur Conan Doyle
To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear, and devils, too.
Graycie Harmon
The more you say, the less people remember.
Francois Fenelon
You know how it is in the kid’s book world; it’s just bunny eat bunny.
Unknown
In any art form, generalities are useless.
Zubin Mehta
Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to.
Jane Rule
There are two kinds of sacrifices: the ordinary kind, and those performed by men who have first purified themselves.
Heraclitus
In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
Oscar Wilde
Scientific people are always curious, and I am going to be scientific. I keep saying to myself: What is it? What is it? It’s something. It can’t be nothing! I don’t know its name, so I call it Magic. I have never seen the sun rise, but Mary and Dickon have, and from what they tell me I am sure that is Magic too. Something pushes it up and draws it. Sometimes since I’ve been in the garden I’ve looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something were pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of Magic: leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.
Ivana Trump
Art can’t hurt you.
Fred Babb
Whenever you read a good book, it’s like the author is right there, in the room talking to you, which is why I don’t like to read good books.
Jack Handy
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
H. P. Lovecraft
Is there no way out of the mind?
Sylvia Plath
Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity.
Joseph Conrad
No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don’t knock your friends. Don’t knock your enemies. Don’t knock yourself.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The structure of myth exists in the mind and needs only be tapped.
Deena Metzger
‘So have I,’ said the stranger, ‘a strong poetic turn. Epic poem – ten thousand lines – revolution of July – composed it on the spot – Mars by day, Apollo by night – bang the field-piece, twang the lyre.’
Charles Dickens
Adversity is the first path to truth.
Lord Byron
Ah, the patter of little feet around the house. There’s nothing like having a midget for a butler.
W. C. Fields
Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
E. M. Forster
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
Franz Kafka
All fiction is for me a kind of magic and trickery – a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true.
Angus Wilson
Life always spills over the rim of every cup.
Boris Pasternak
One who is caught in thought loses his original nature. All he knows are words and descriptions. When he sees the actual thing, he fails to perceive it.
Dalai Lama
I write because I like to write.
Paddy Chayefsky
The task of a writer consists in being able to make something out of an idea.
Thomas Mann
I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don’t know – the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.
Robert Frost
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
Dorothy Parker
Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?
Jane Austen
One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.
Jack London
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
William James
I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.
James M. Barrie
One must work and dare if one really wants to live.
Vincent Van Gogh
The words of the scholar are to be understood. The words of the master are not to be understood. They are to be listened to as one listens to the wind in the trees and the sound of the river and the song of the bird. They will awaken something within the heart that is beyond all knowledge.
Anthony de Mello
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
Sylvia Plath
In the world of words imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Wallace Stevens
It’s funny that pirates were always going around searching for treasure, and never realized that the real treasure was the fond memories they were creating.
Jack Handy
This is where I begin to live my life, knowing that nothing matters, nothing ever matters like the love you receive and the love you give.
Bernice Ellis
Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.
Sir Winston Churchill
For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem.
Bishop Berkeley
Any fool can make a rule. And every fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau
No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
Thomas Hardy
I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.
E. M. Forster
Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.
William Shakespeare
That’s something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
Alice Munro
Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
P. G. Wodehouse
To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
Walt Whitman
If you would have a faithful servant, and one that you like, serve yourself.
Benjamin Franklin
He who worships a punishing God becomes a surrogate punisher.
Hermaptios
Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.
Bonnie Friedman
And as to experience – well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.
Elizabeth Bishop
There are men that will make you books and turn them loose into the world with as much dispatch as they would a dish of fritters.
Miguel de Cervantes
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
Confucius
I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.
Mark Twain
A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch.
Friedrich Nietzsche
For the cat is cryptic, and close to Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
H. P. Lovecraft
Beware of the need to be literal, for this often shrouds deeper knowledge.
Deena Metzger
The knower and the known are one.
Meister Eckhart
Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.
William Makepeace Thackeray
The great art of life is sensation: to feel that we exist, even in pain.
Lord Byron
Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
Joseph Conrad
The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going.
Epictetus
It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.
Gertrude Stein
I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.
Etty Hillesum
Men and words are ready made, and you, O Painter, if you do not know how to make your figures move, are like an orator who knows not how to use his words.
Leonardo da Vinci
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Carl Jung
All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth have not any subsistence without a mind.
Bishop Berkeley
Words have a longer life than deeds.
Pindar
Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
If you ever catch on fire, try to avoid looking in a mirror, because I bet that will really throw you into a panic.
Jack Handy
Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure.
Meister Eckhart
A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.
Miguel de Cervantes
Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.
Thomas Wolf
When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder – that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make.
Anton Chekhov
I write to find out what I’m thinking about.
Edward Albee
The brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s fancy; it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
Oscar Wilde
An onion can make people cry, but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.
Will Rogers
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
Carl Jung
Teatime – trying to write – God! I have a brain like a peanut. “Found a peanut, found a peanut,” echoes in my head the insane song.
John Dos Passos
The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.
Robert Oppenheimer
Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.
W. H. Auden
A writer’s inspiration is not just to create. He must eat three times a day.
Pierre Beaumarchais
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
Ayn Rand
Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from our insane passion for the truth.
Umberto Eco
In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.
Samuel Johnson
When I want to read a novel, I write one.
Benjamin Disraeli
People fear the unkown; what they should fear is the known.
Deepak Chopra
The least of things with meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
Carl Jung
At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all my soul. At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my ignorance upon the shore.
Kahlil Gibran
Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.
Raymond Chandler
What we don’t know, rather than what we know, can be the very core of story.
Deena Metzger
The most beautiful thing about capitalism is the incompetence of dishonesty.
John Wall
Our free will is fate.
Oswald Spengler
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
Without darkness, there is no dream.
John Ruskin
Good writers are almost never dangerous.
John Gardner
Writing is not a genteel profession; it’s quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.
Rosemary Mahoney
Flowers wither not the Spring;
Fathers perish not their love.
Spirit gambols in the flesh
Until what’s mortal cannot dance.
All that’s good in you shall live,
Survives the falling of the mask,
And if God asks me who you are,
I’ll say that part that did not die.
W. Hamnet Wall
I am not very scrupulous, I own, when I have a good idea, how I came into possession of it.
Lord Byron
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
Franz Kafka
Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.
W. C. Fields
To make dictionaries is dull work.
Samuel Johnson
You’ve really got to start hitting the books because it’s no joke out here.
Harper Lee
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
William Haxlitt
The measure of a man is what he does with power.
Pittacus
Conscience makes egoists of us all.
Oscar Wilde
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Proust
Children need encouragement. If a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way he develops a good, lucky feeling.
Jack Handy
Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.
Melinda Haynes
Remember, a word is an invention, a symbol for an idea. Written text began as an artistic representation of a thought or event.
Edward J. Fraughton
At the root of our lives is a question, a series of questions, a quest, some fundamental concerns or obsessions; the mystery, the story, and the meaning of our lives reside there. A story also has a question at the core of it, and the question leads to the mystery within the story. The deeper one goes into the story, the more one learns, the more things are revealed, the deeper the mystery. Perhaps the story has no other function than to ask this question or to deepen the mystery.
Deena Metzger
Those blessings that I have to give, I give you freely, and those I do not have to give, you are seeking on your own.
Seth
At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
E. M. Forster
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Theodore Dreiser
Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The wheel is come full circle.
William Shakespeare
The facts are always less than what really happened.
Nadine Gordimer
I always write with a Ticonderoga #2 pencil. I started out with it, and I’ll go to that Great Bookstore in the Sky with one of those in my hand.
Robert Ludlum
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
Clarence Budington Kelland
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.
Ursula K. LeGuin
Here’s to alcohol, the cause of – and solution to – all life’s problems.
Homer Simpson
Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
Adam Smith
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
James Thurber
Life is the childhood of immortality.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.
Will Rogers
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
Carl Jung
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.
William Faulkner
One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.
Voltaire
Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.
Deborah Eisenberg
Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
Marquis de Sade
Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.
John Barth
There is no happiness in love except at the end of an English novel.
Anthony Trollope
It’s sad that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs.
Jack Handy
The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.
William Makepeace Thackeray
This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
Joseph Conrad
Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
William James
A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.
Buckminster Fuller
If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
Ray Bradbury
It’s hard to be aggressive when you’re confused.
Vince Lombardi
Dogs are philosophers. They soon forget.
P. G. Wodehouse
There is no substitute for craft. Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
Anthony Burgess
The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.
Simone Weil
That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.
Marcus Aurelius
There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.
Herman Melville
To Zeus all things are good, fair and just.
Heraclitus
My work is about emotions for which I have no words.
Robert Sturman
Nothing is easier than saying words. Nothing is harder than living them day after day.
Arthur Gordon
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
William Blake
Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological.
Anthony Storr
When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order.
Meister Eckhart
When in doubt, go for the dick joke.
Robin Williams
Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die of it.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
Jorge Luis Borges
The writer’s genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer’s only stuff for sale.
James Gunn
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
John Steinbeck
Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.
Will Rogers
The work was like peeling an onion. The outer skin came off with difficulty, but in no time you’d be down to its innards, tears streaming from your eyes as more and more beautiful reductions became possible.
Edward Blishen
Few people have the imagination for reality.
Goethe
Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.
Horace
Take one part Mercurii Solis, the preparation of which I have already taught in another place by its proper process. Draw off its airy water so that it becomes a subtle dust and calx. Then take two parts of our blessed oil, and pour the oil very slowly, drop by drop onto the dust of the Mercurii Solis, until everything has become absorbed. Put it in a vial, well sealed, into a heat of the first degree of the oven of secrets, and let it remain there for ten days and nights. You will then see your powder and oil quite dry, such that it has become a single piece of dust of a blackish grey colour. After ten days give it the second degree of heat, and the grey and black colour will slowly change into a whiteness so that it becomes more or less white. And at the end of these ten days, the matter will take on a beautiful rose white. But this may be ignored. For this colour is only due to the Mercurio Solis, that has swallowed up our blessed oil, and now covers it with the innermost part of its body. But by the power of the fire, our oil will again subdue such Mercurium Solis, and throw it into its innermost. And the oil with its very bright red colour will rule over it and remain on the outside. Therefore it is time, when twenty days have passed, that you open the window of the third degree. The external white colour and force will then completely recede inwardly, and the internal red colour will, by the force of the fire, become external. Keep also this degree of fire for ten days, without increase or decrease. You will then see your powder, that was previously white, now become very red. But for the time being this redness may be ignored, for it is still unfixed and volatile; and at the end of these ten days, when the thirtieth day has passed, you should open the last window of the fourth degree of fire, Let it stay in this degree for another ten days, and this very bright red powder will begin to melt. Let it stay in flux for these ten days. And when you take it out you will find on the bottom a very bright red and transparent stone, ruby colored.
Roger Bacon
Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
E. B. White
What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds?
Ray Bradbury
I still read everything aloud. I have a fundamental conviction that if a sentence cannot be read aloud with sincerity, conviction, and communicable emphasis, it’s not a good sentence. Good writing requires good rhythms and good words.
Richard Marius
A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.
Bishop Berkeley
Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.
William Goldman
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.
Truman Capote
It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
Carl Jung
i do not put Collers what do not Belong. I Think it spoils The pictures. There have Been a lot of paintins spoiled By putin Collers where They do not Blong.
Alfred Wallis
Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hours will last.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.
Jane Austen
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.
Rachel Carson
Shouldn’t the philosopher be able to rise above a faith in grammar?
Friedrich Nietzsche
I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.
Lord Byron
Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book.
Raymond Chandler
I finished my play today. Three acts, six scenes, a masterpiece completed in a few weeks. The play only exists as a tiny scrawl in my notebooks – things I carry about in my pockets.
George Bernard Shaw
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
Willa Cather
I am not young enough to know everything.
James M. Barrie
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
T. S. Eliot
Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.
William Wordsworth
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Jonathan Swift
The one thing that don’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
Harper Lee
The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.
Henry David Thoreau
There’s the wretched business of getting from lunch to supper.
Virginia Woolf
To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown – the shadow-haunted Outside – we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.
H. P. Lovecraft
Writing only leads to more writing.
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
Mark Twain
Ignorance is like a delicate flower: touch it and the bloom is gone.
Oscar Wilde
You must be prepared to work always without applause.
Ernest Hemingway
Resist the temptation to try to use dazzling style to conceal weakness of substance.
Stanley Schmidt
A prince who is not himself wise cannot be well advised.
Machiavelli
Too many words spoil the poem.
John McEnulty
Only the educated are free.
Epictetus
As vast as this space without is the tiny space within your heart: heaven and earth are found in it, fire and air, sun and moon, lightning and the constellations, whatever belongs to you here below and all that doesn’t, all this is gathered in the tiny space within your heart.
Chandogya Upanishad
A text cannot say everything. It can only go as far as all words can go. Beyond them begins another zone, a zone of mystery, of silence, which one calls the atmosphere.
Gaston Baty
I discovered that if I trusted my subconscious, or imagination, whatever you want to call it, and if I made the characters as real and honest as I could, then no matter how complex the pattern being woven, my subconscious would find ways to tie it together.
Tad Williams
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy, the process of setting man free from men.
Ayn Rand
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Consider the daffodil. And while you’re doing that, I’ll be over here, looking through your stuff.
Jack Handy
Definitions would be good things if we did not use words to make them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung
Do the best you can, and don’t take life too serious.
Will Rogers
In the dark time, the eye begins to see.
Theodore Roethke
I write, therefore, I am.
Samuel Johnson
By writing much, one learns to write well.
Robert Southey
Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.
Oscar Wilde
Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
E. M. Forster
From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
Frank Herbert
The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.
Lord Byron
Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.
Dr Seuss
If there are frontiers between the civilized and barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.
Ursula K. LeGuin
Pen names are masks that allow us to unmask ourselves.
C. Astrid Weber
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel is that it be interesting.
Henry James
Prose wanders around with a lantern and laboriously schedules and verifies the details and particulars of a valley and its frame of crags and peaks, then poetry comes and lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.
Mark Twain
The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
Carl Jung
We are alike in pickiness but not in the subject matter we are picking about.
Rhonda Burtz
The ego is the enemy because it is against love. When I look at myself, I don’t love others. When I want to occupy for myself what is yours, I become the killer of my brother, like Cain killed Abel. When I want to satisfy myself, this satisfaction is gained through sacrificing the freedom of the other. Then my ego becomes my lord, my god, and there is no stronger temptation than this. Because to us, this ego may seem like a diamond. It has a shine like gold. But whatever is shining is not gold. The ego is just like a fire without light, a fire without warmth, a fire without life. It seems that it has many sides and many possibilities – but what is this possibility? What is ego? Only the means by which I protect myself as if I were in a battle, as if every other person is my enemy, and the only thing I care about is winning the victory.
Archimandrite Dionysios
Greatness means going on, going on means going far, and going far means turning back.
Lao Tzu
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare.
Henry David Thoreau
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
Ernest Hemingway
Virtue would not go to such lengths if vanity did not keep her company.
La Rouchefaucauld
Live dangerously and you live right.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Make a point ever so clear, it is great odds that any man whose habits and the bent of whose mind lie a contrary way, shall be unable to comprehend it. So weak a thing is reason in competition with inclination.
Bishop Berkeley
When I say beautiful things, I’m not necessarily living them; when I live them, the beautiful thing is that words aren’t necessary.
Brock Tully
I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write.
P. G. Wodehouse
Everyone has one good poem in his hidden head.
Don Welch
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
Alfred Lord Tennyson
I suppose publishers are untrustworthy. They certainly look it.
Oscar Wilde
The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.
Meister Eckhart
The praise that comes from love does not make us vain, but more humble.
James M. Barrie
To live happily is an inward power of the soul.
Marcus Aurelius
Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.
Walt Whitman
Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert
I am a verb.
Ulysses S. Grant
I believe I hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception, and ignorance, but it isn’t – it’s human.
Erasmus
It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.
Sinclair Lewis
Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.
Agatha Christie
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
Carl Jung
Art is utterance.
Asterio Tecson
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.
Jack London
A fool and his money are soon elected.
Will Rogers
The arts are not decorative. They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.
Edward Albee
Characterization is an accident that flows out of action and dialogue.
Jack Woodford
Follow your honest convictions and be strong.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Those who think to win the world
by doing something to it,
I see them come to grief.
For the world is a sacred object.
Nothing is to be done to it.
To do anything is to damage it.
To seize it is to lose it.
Lao Tzu
He suffered occasionally from a rush of words to the head.
Herbert Samuel
The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
Clifton Fadiman
God: a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive.
Ayn Rand
He reproduced himself with humble objectivity, with the unquestioning matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.
Rainer Maria Rilke
There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.
Charles Dickens
I too love theories. They are so much more concrete than reality.
P. Q. Wall
There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.
Brian Aldiss
Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
Jean-Paul Sartre
All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. Religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.
Harvey Cox
Happiness is your birthright. It shouldn’t depend upon you achieving something.
Steve Chandler
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf
It is the tortured who turn into torturers.
Carl Jung
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect, I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn’t getting on. It’s a series of well-turned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to unscrew them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wants the sail to take more wind.
Gustave Flaubert
When you see the same thing over and over again your brain expends less and less energy. Your mind already knows what it’s seeing, so it doesn’t make the effort to process the event again.
Dr. Gregory Berns
Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
Samuel Butler
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To create something you must be something.
Goethe
I once had a rose named after me and was very flattered. But I was not so pleased to read the description in the catalogue: “No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
Just because you’re a perfectionist doesn’t mean you’re perfect.
Jack Nicholson
How can the lord of ten thousand chariots let his own person weigh less in the balance than his land?
Lao Tzu
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.
Oscar Wilde
If you could be freed from self, then you would have the nature of the highest angels as completely as you now have your own.
Meister Eckhart
Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.
Kahlil Gibran
The two most beautiful words in the English language are Check Enclosed.
Dorothy Parker
I think the mistake a lot of us make is thinking the state-appointed shrink is our friend.
Jack Handy
It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Why wouldn’t you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It’s far more interesting to write about others.
Susan Sontag
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head, and as you get older you become more skillful casting them.
Gore Vidal
I have just read your lousy review. You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight ulcer man on a four ulcer job. I have never met you but if I do, you’ll need a new nose.
Harry S. Truman
Your work is to discover your world and then with your all your heart give yourself to it.
Buddha
My crown is called content; a crown it is that seldom kings enjoy.
William Shakespeare
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.
Robert Frost
Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.
Lord Byron
One is certain of nothing but the truth of one’s own emotions.
E. M. Forster
The bible says to love your enemies. Just for practice, why don’t you try it out on your friends?
Will Rogers
If the public likes you, you’re good.
Mickey Spillane
Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
Charles Baudelaire
Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
Gore Vidal
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
Sinclair Lewis
I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
Jean Jacque