Select Quotes on Writing and Writers

If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter. -Anonymous

One has to live a life that creates a writer. -Erno Paasilinna

Writers will happen in the best of families. -Rita Mae Brown

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. -Willa Cather

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. -Samuel Lover

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.- Elie Weisel

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter. -Jessamyn West

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted. - Jules Renard

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
-Gloria Steinem

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

In good writing, words become one with things. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. 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...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

No one is asking, let alone demanding, that you write. The world is not waiting with bated breath for your article or book. Whether or not you get a single word on paper, the sun will rise, the earth will spin, the universe will expand. Writing is forever and always a choice - your choice. -Beth Mende Conny

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer - and if so, why? -Bennett Cerf

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge. -H.G.Wells

You perceive the force of a word. 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...Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world. - Joseph Conrad

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