Writing Quotes

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.

It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writings than to put one principle into practice.

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.

Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.

Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

I write to find out what I didn't know I knew.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

Never discuss the poem you contemplate writing. It's like turning on the outside spigot. It takes all the pressure off the upstairs bathroom.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.