200 Writing Quotes

One of the few ways left to make a lot of money without investing a lot of money is to write a book or a screenplay that sells. Of course, these projects take a lot of time and effort, but the payoffs can be huge.

Just look at J.K. Rowling, famous for being the first and so far the only self-made billionaire writer: She was a single mother with an infant child living on welfare when she finished writing her first novel Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone!

As for Hollywood screenplays, the average ones sell for about $750,000, but if it happens to be exactly what they’re looking for a the moment, it can go for millions! So, if you’ve ever thought about writing a book or a screenplay, take the time to read a few biographies of how your favorite writers did it. There are literally thousands of rags to riches stories of people just like you and me who decided to go for it and struck it rich! For example, Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club was told by her former boss to give up her dream of ever becoming a writer because she would fail miserably. J. K. Rowling was also told by her first publisher that she ought to look for a day job because she was not likely to succeed as a children’s book writer. Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, never even graduated from high school, though she did subsequently receive a college degree. This list is endless!

I bring all of this up because, for years, I admired great writers so much that I dared not believe that I could ever become one. I thought all artists must suffer for their art, and I just didn’t want to suffer anymore. I felt I had already paid more than my dues in my first 30 years of life, so I opted for what most folks would consider a “cushy” job, a nice “office” job. Well, my legal career was neither cushy nor nice, but it did give me a steady paycheck. The only problem was my soul cried out for so much more! Parts of me died every year, till I worried there wouldn’t be anything left of the real me if I continued to ignore my passion for writing about stuff that really mattered to me and, I hoped, to others like me in the world. Thankfully, I kept a diary all those years, which was enough to keep that tiny spark alive, just in case I found the courage to attempt to follow in my heroes’ footsteps.

Well, guess what? It doesn’t feel like suffering at all! I feel resurrected—so much in love with my work that it feels strange to call it “work.” As I gathered the quotes below, I purposely excluded all discouraging comments, unless they were at least witty, humorous, or otherwise offered something of value. Some writers are just snobs who think that only the most skillful writers should ever pick up a pencil. I strongly disagree! That’s exactly the kind of thinking that kept me from my love of writing for too many years, but no longer! And, you shouldn’t be discouraged, either, if you have a dream; whether it’s a novel, screenplay, your life story, self help books, a brand new invention, a new improvement on an pre-existing invention, or any other business idea that you’ve been harboring in your heart, follow your bliss! It’s what we were meant to do. Go ahead: Make yourself happy!

200 QUOTES ABOUT WRITING

1. 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

2. Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.
- Franklin P. Adams

3. Learn as much by writing as by reading.
- Lord Acton

4. Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.
- A. Bronson Alcott

5. Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It’s the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.
- Rhys Alexander

6. Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
- Hannah Arendt

7. Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it’s so hurtful to think about writing.
- Heather Armstrong, “Dooce.com”

8. Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
- Sholem Asch

9. If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
- Isaac Asimov

10. You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success—but only if you persist.
- Isaac Asimov

11. If you want to write, you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And, if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.
- Gordon Atkinson, “RealLivePreacher.com”

12. I think people want their illusions; and, writers are mostly illusion. When you read their words, you read a flattened, incomplete version of the writer.
- Gordon Atkinson, “RealLivePreacher.com”

13. I write because I’m afraid to say some things out loud.
- Gordon Atkinson, “RealLivePreacher.com”

14. See things as they are and write about them. Don’t waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.
- Gordon Atkinson, “RealLivePreacher.com”

15. This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you’re doing, or it comes out flat. You can’t fake your way through this.
- Gordon Atkinson, “RealLivePreacher.com”

16. Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
- Francis Bacon

17. Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
- Francis Bacon

18. The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.
- Russell Baker

19. I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.
- Stephanie Barron

20. It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order.
- Ann Beattie

21. Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.
- Thomas Berger

22. It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing; but, I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
- Robert Benchley

23. 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

24. About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
- Josh Billings

25. 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

26. 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

27. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
- Ray Bradbury

28. 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

29. You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
- Ray Bradbury

30. Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.
- Carol Burnett

31. It’s not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules.
- Eric A. Burns

32. This is the sixth book I’ve written, which isn’t bad for a guy who’s only read two.
- George Burns

33. They lard their lean books with the fat of others’ works.
- Robert Burton

34. When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
- Samuel Butler

35. Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
- Samuel Butler

36. If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.
- Lord Byron

37. To withdraw myself from myself, has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
- Lord Byron

38. The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
- Elias Canetti

39. To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.
- Truman Capote

40. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
- Truman Capote

41. Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
- Orson Scott Card

42. 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

43. An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
- François-René de Chateaubriand

44. Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
- Anton Chekhov

45. You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
- G. K. Chesterton

46. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
- G. K. Chesterton

47. It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one’s thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
- Isabel Colgate

48. 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

49. Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason. They made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
- Charles Caleb Colton

50. Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
- Cyril Connolly

51. 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

52. I keep little notepads all over the place to write down ideas as soon as they strike; but, the ones that fill up the quickest are always the ones at my nightstand.
- Emily Logan Decens

53. I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.
- Peter De Vries

54. Publication—is the auction of the Mind of Man.
- Emily Dickinson

55. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
- Joan Didion

56. The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
- Benjamin Disraeli

57. Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
- E. L. Doctorow

58. 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

59. 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

60. Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
- Daphne du Maurier

61. Most editors are failed writers—but so are most writers.
- T. S. Eliot

62. It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.
- Havelock Ellis

63. All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

64. 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

65. The artist’s only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one … If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.
- William Faulkner

66. 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

67. An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
- Gustave Flaubert

68. Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains. God composes; why shouldn’t we?
- Audra Foveo-Alba

69. Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
- Gene Fowler

70. Writing is a struggle against silence.
- Carlos Fuentes

71. A notepad by the bedside accounts for half the earnings of my livelihood. If it weren’t for bedtime, half my novels would still be stuck at dock.
- Ever Garrison

72. The expression “to write something down” suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
- William Gass

73. Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
- Edward Gibbon

74. What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.
- André Gide

75. The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
- André Gide

76. A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end … but not necessarily in that order.
- Jean Luc Godard

77. Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.
- Goethe

78. If any man wishes to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and, if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
- Goethe

79. A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.
- Baltasar Gracián

80. Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life.
- James Norman Hall

81. Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word.
- Gail Hamilton

82. The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and, when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and, yet, so that they may have a relish.
- Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

83. The reason why many people are so fond of using superlatives is they are so positive that the poor positive is not half positive enough for them.
- Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

84. Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.
- Graycie Harmon

85. Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear—and devils, too.
- Graycie Harmon

86. I even shower with my pen, in case any ideas drip out of the waterhead.
- Graycie Harmon

87. 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

88. Easy reading is damn hard writing.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

89. 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

90. Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of; but, do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
- Robert Heinlein

91. Every writer I know has trouble writing.
- Joseph Heller

92. 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

92. If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.
- Victor Hugo

93. A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.
- John K. Hutchens

94. The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way, you would never do anything.
- John Irving

95. Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
- Henry James

96. The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.
- Jeff Jarvis

97. A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
- Samuel Johnson

98. The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
- Samuel Johnson

99. An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.
- Juvenal

100. Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
- Franz Kafka

101. The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.
- Alfred Kazin

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

103. If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.
- Stephen King

104. You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s 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

105. All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
- Bobby Knight

106. A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
- Karl Kraus

107. My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
- Karl Kraus

108. Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.
- Walter Savage Landor

109. If I’m trying to sleep, the ideas won’t stop. If I’m trying to write, there appears a barren nothingness.
- Carrie Latet

110. Authorship is exhibitionism, and readers a species of voyeur.
- Carrie Latet

111. Writing is a product of silence.
- Carrie Latet

112. I am a man, and alive … For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.
- D. H. Lawrence

113. I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
- Elmore Leonard

114. 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

115. 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

116. It is impossible to discourage the real writers—they don’t give a damn what you say; they’re going to write.
- Sinclair Lewis

117. If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.
- Elaine Liner

118. When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But, if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.
- Samuel Lover

119. No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.
- Russell Lynes

120. 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

121. Writing well means never having to say, “I guess you had to be there.”
- Jeff Mallett

122. A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
- Thomas Mann

123. If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that’s read by persons who move their lips when they’re reading to themselves.
- Don Marquis

124. i never think at all when i write
nobody can do two things at the same time
and do them both well
- Don Marquis

125. A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.
- W. Somerset Maugham

126. The best style is the style you don’t notice.
- W. Somerset Maugham

127. A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
- Mignon McLaughlin

128. 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

129. 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

130. I’m not a very good writer; but, I’m an excellent rewriter.
- James Michener

131. I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
- James Michener

132. An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
- Charles Monstesquieu

133. If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
- Toni Morrison

134. First you’re an unknown; then, you write one book and you move up to obscurity.
- Martin Myers

135. 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

136. 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

137. You ask me why I do not write something … I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.
- Florence Nightingale

138. The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
- Anaïs Nin

139. 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

140. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
- George Orwell

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

142. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.
- George Orwell

143. If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don’t remove it—I might be writing in my dreams.
- Danzae Pace

144. 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

145. Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography; but, I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
- Katherine Paterson

146. 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

147. And, by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
- Sylvia Plath

148. The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought; this, in turn, makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.
- Norbet Platt

149. 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

150. When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
- Enrique Jardiel Poncela

151. True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
- Alexander Pope

152. Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals.
- Marcel Proust

153. What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.
- Burton Rascoe

154. He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.
- John Ray

155. The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.
- Jules Renard

156. Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.
- Jules Renard

157. Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
- Jules Renard

158. 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

159. The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can’t help it.
- Leo Rosten

160. Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and, in the plainest possible words, or he will certainly misunderstand them.
- John Ruskin

161. It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes; it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
- Vita Sackville-West

162. Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
- William Safire, “Great Rules of Writing”

163. Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
- David Sedaris

164. The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
- Edwin Schlossberg

165. The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
- George Bernard Shaw

166. The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer

167. Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate
expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer

168. 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

169. There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
- Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

170. I do not like to write—I like to have written.
- Gloria Steinem

171. An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
- Adlai Stevenson

172. Vigorous writing is concise.
- William Strunk, Jr.

173. Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.
- Jesse Stuart

174. 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

175. It’s not plagiarism—I’m recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do.
- Uniek Swain

176. 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

177. A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought, as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
- Henry David Thoreau

178. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
- Henry David Thoreau

179. 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

180. 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

181. 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

182. 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

183. As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out.
- Mark Twain

184. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
- Mark Twain

185. I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.
- John Updike

186. This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me.
- Colleen Wainwright

187. Pen names are masks that allow us to unmask ourselves.
- C. Astrid Weber

188. Novelists … fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.
- Fay Weldon

189. No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.
- George C. Wells

190. There is no royal path to good writing; and, such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
- Jessamyn West

191. Keep a diary and one day it’ll keep you.
- Mae West

192. A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
- Edith Wharton

193. Be obscure clearly.
- E. B. White

194. Writing is both mask and unveiling.
- E. B. White

195. 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

196. A writer’s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.
- Ethel Wilson

197. Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies.
- Emme Woodhull-Bäche

198. 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

199. Writer’s block is a disease for which there is no cure, only respite.
- Laurie Wordholt

200. Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
- William Wordsworth

CONCLUSION

If you’ve been carrying a dream to do something with your life “someday … maybe … if only,” don’t wait too long. It just feels too amazing for me not to spread the good news that you will not regret it! Even if you never make a penny doing it (but I’m sure you will be financially successful, too, if you truly enjoy doing it), the sheer happiness and joy will improve your love for living and undoubtedly your health and all of your relationships, too, because it honestly feels that good! Of course, you might lose any “friends” who become confused by, or jealous of, your newfound happiness. But, when one door closes, another opens; and, you will find yourself drawn to and attracting other happy, positive people like you never did before! : )

[Note: More writing quotes in the comments section below! : ) Rather than changing the title of this post—which would require changing all the links, too—I simply added the ones I found later while working on other quote lists.]

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