writing

1.

This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.

- George Burns

2.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

- Peter De Vries

3.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

- Marquis, Don

4.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

- Fowler, Gene

5.

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.

- Henri Frédéric Amiel

6.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

- Saul Bellow

7.

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

- Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

8.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

- Hemingway, Ernest

9.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

- Mark Twain

10.

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

- Feuerbach, Ludwig

11.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

- Honore de Balzac

12.

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

- Benjamin Franklin

13.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despairûthe sense that you can never completely put on the page whatÆs in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

- Stephen King

14.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

- Vidal, Gore

15.

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

16.

When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech-one does not, at least, hear how inadequate the words are.

- George Eliot

17.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

- Auden, W. H.

18.

The Enemy, who wears her mother's usual face and confidential tone, has access; doubtless stares into her writing case and listens on the phone.

- Mcginley, Phyllis

19.

Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.

- Raleigh, Sir Walter

20.

’Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill Appear in writing or in judging ill; But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ offence To tire our patience, than mislead our sense.

- Alexander Pope