Writing: A catless writer is almost inconceivable; even Ernest Hemingway, manly follower of the hunting trophy and the bullfight, lived waist-deep in cats. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys. ~Barbara Holland

Writing: A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. ~Mignon McLaughlin

Writing: A good author dances on typewriter keys. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. ~G.K. Chesterton

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

Writing: A guide to the writer's best friend and the editor's right hand — an annotated selection of abridged and unabridged and specialized dictionaries, supplementary volumes, and stylistic aids in dictionary form." ~Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 1979; "Is Academia the Writer's Best Friend?" June/July 1981 Coda; "...a good editor is a writer's best friend." ~Bonnie McCafferty

Writing: A man may speak with his tongue and only be heard around the corner; but another man may speak with his pen and be heard around the globe. ~James Lendall Basford

Writing: A metaphor is like a simile. ~Author Unknown

Writing: 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

Writing: A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. ~Edna St. Vincent Millay

Writing: 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

Writing: A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ~Jean Luc Godard

Writing: A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one. ~Baltasar Gracian, translated from Spanish

Writing: A typical Mailer bon mot: an impeccable thought and an elegant formulation, preceded by seven words of needless mush. ~Jim Lewis

Writing: A well-disposed research librarian is a writer's best friend, as essential as ink. ~Barbara Rogan

Writing: 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

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

Writing: A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann

Writing: A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. ~Karl Kraus

Writing: A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head. ~Ethel Wilson

Writing: All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so you can give that to people, then you are a writer. ~Ernest Hemingway

Writing: All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. ~Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Writing: An author plants the alphabet — and harvests flowers, nourishment, and weeds. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: An author, behind his words, is naked. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff. ~Adlai Stevenson

Writing: An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts. ~Juvenal

Writing: An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. ~François-Rene de Chateaubriand

Writing: 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

Writing: As children, some of us liked magic and fantasy, more than reality. So, we became writers. ~Dr. SunWolf

Writing: 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

Writing: As is invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary biographies, the little boy was a glutton for books.... For his first writing exercise he painstakingly reproduced: "Obey your sovereign, honor him and submit to his laws," and the compressed ball of his index finger thus remained ink-stained forever. Now the thirties are over and the forties have begun. ~Vladimir Nabokov

Writing: As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out. ~Mark Twain

Writing: At the point of the pen is the focus of the mind. ~James Lendall Basford

Writing: Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free. ~Samuel Johnson

Writing: Authors are magpies, echoing each other's words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters. ~Bergen Evans

Writing: Authorship is exhibitionism, and readers a species of voyeur. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: Be obscure clearly. ~E.B. White

Writing: Being an author is being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear - and devils, too. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: Between the two windows stood the writing-table, covered with heaps of newspapers, stacks of letters, mountains of ledgers, bound in canvas or leather, and tipped with brass at the corners; a chaos for every eye and every hand but the master's. ~Franz von Dingelstedt

Writing: 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

Writing: Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice. ~Norman Mailer

Writing: Caress your phrase tenderly: it will end by smiling at you. ~Anatole France

Writing: 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

Writing: Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs. ~Jerome Stern

Writing: Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there. ~Walter Benjamin

Writing: Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. ~Jack London

Writing: Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov

Writing: 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

Writing: Drink and be filled up. ~Stephen King

Writing: Each book written hardens the author a little more. The best are concrete — but cracked, with a flower growing through. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: Easy reading is damn hard writing. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Writing: Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Writing: 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

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

Writing: Every word born of an inner necessity — writing must never be anything else. ~Etty Hillesum

Writing: Every writer I know has trouble writing. ~Joseph Heller

Writing: 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

Writing: Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth

Writing: Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Writing: For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. ~John Cheever

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: How can a man freshen and enrich his style? Read and reread the Bible and Shakespeare and Defoe and Swift and Bunyan and Tennyson, for all of these have a genius for pouring the water of life into the clay jugs of Saxon speech. ~Charles Edward Jefferson

Writing: How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! ~Henry David Thoreau, journal

Writing: Human language may be polite and powerless in itself, uplifted with difficulty into expression by the high thoughts it utters, or it may in itself become so saturated with warm life and delicious association that every sentence shall palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables.... There may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter: there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence. ~Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Writing: I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. ~English professor at Ohio University, name unknown

Writing: I am tempted to call this section Economics, for it concerns the loss and gain (economically, psychically, physically) of living as a writer. Let's settle, however, for a term that may be closer to the everyday reality: Lit Biz. Spend your working life as a writer and depend on it-your income, your spirit, and your liver are all on close terms with Lit Biz. ~Norman Mailer

Writing: 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

Writing: I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write. ~Anton Chekhov

Writing: I could give you a number of examples to show how widespread has been this practice of mutual pilfering among the authors of our old literature.... by transferring something of theirs to his own immortal work he [Virgil] has ensured that the memory of these old writers—whom, as the tastes of today show, we are already beginning to deride as well as to neglect—should not wholly perish. ~Macrobius

Writing: I even shower with my pen, in case any ideas drip out of the waterhead. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: I have given up writing and married a farmer.... He has to hire "a help," and do the chores himself, while I, sure of food and shelter for the first time in my life, sit by the fire

Writing: I have succeeded in arresting some casual wing of thought as it flew, some transient wave of emotion as it subsided... ~William Watson

Writing: I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of William Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon. ~Bill Hoest

Writing: I heard that if you locked William Shakespeare in a room with a typewriter for long enough he'd eventually write all the songs by the Monkees. ~Author unknown

Writing: I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. ~Peter De Vries

Writing: I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. ~James Michener

Writing: I really would like to stop working forever-never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now-and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends.... Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence. ~Allen Ginsberg

Writing: I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say My God, did I write that? ~Ray Bradbury, National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters acceptance speech, 2000 November 15th

Writing: I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end with a skyscraper made of wood. ~Norman Mailer

Writing: I take joy in what I do. I have a wonderful relationship with my waking self every morning and that hour around 7:30 when your brain is not connected to your ears, when it's floating around inside your head full of metaphors. I lie in bed and I watch the metaphors collect and drift and when they reach a certain point of collision, I jump out of bed and get them down before they go away. ~Ray Bradbury, National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters acceptance speech, 2000 November 15th

Writing: 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

Writing: I took my paper and ink into the garden, looking up to God for assistance, and wrote freely for two hours. I find all the difference in writing out of doors, with quiet and pleasing objects before my eyes, and within, where I can do nothing without closing my eyes upon the things before me. ~Henry Martyn

Writing: I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard

Writing: I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. ~John Updike

Writing: I would always be that same maddening, monstrous mixture of pedantry, egoism, politeness, selfishness, kindliness, sneakiness, larkiness, sociability, loneliness, ambition, ordered calm and hidden intensity. I would cover my life with words. I would spray the whole bloody world with words. ~Stephen Fry

Writing: I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. ~Richard Wright

Writing: I write because I'm afraid to say some things out loud. ~Gordon Atkinson, reallivepreacher.com

Writing: I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of [$h¡t]. I try to put the **** in the wastebasket. ~Ernest Hemingway

Writing: I write with great difficulty.... Don't like to write, but like having written. Hate the effort of driving pen from line to line, work only three hours a day, but work every day. ~Frank Norris

Writing: I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. ~Jack Smith

Writing: I'm a singer-songwriter.... If I'm not doing it, I'm like a flower without water. When I'm doing it, I'm a sunflower six feet tall.... Writing songs is like free therapy. Instead of paying a guy 125 bucks an hour to pull stuff out of me, I pull it out of myself and put it on paper. And then I own it, but it doesn't own me. ~Rob from Tucson, Arizona

Writing: I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~James Michener

Writing: I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM. ~Tiffany Madison

Writing: If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. ~Lord Byron

Writing: If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it - I might be writing in my dreams. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. ~Henry Rollins

Writing: If I'm trying to sleep, the ideas won't stop. If I'm trying to write, there appears a barren nothingness. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: If often seems as if inspired minds had penned their words of wisdom and beauty with quills plucked from the wings of angels. ~James Lendall Basford

Writing: If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison

Writing: If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. ~Anaïs Nin

Writing: 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

Writing: In literature, when nine hundred and ninety-nine souls ignore you, but the thousandth buys your work, or at least borrows it - that is called enormous popularity. ~Arnold Bennett

Writing: Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains - God composes, why shouldn't we? ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: Is a stolen copyright a copywrong? ~Anonymous

Writing: It has been said, time and time repeated, that once you get ink in your blood, running strong in your veins, you can never get it out.... You never grow too old to write when the ink is in your blood. Your fingers still itch to record the ideas you have. Your eye is still proud to read a bit of work that you have created. Your mind is still capable of being astonished at the power it holds. No, you are never too old to see a new adventure and get it down, quick. Men have left writing for other positions and they have always been restless until they are back at the desk, with their pens, their typewriters, and their inky hands. Their desire for creation and their pride in their product can find no outlet, and you know what happens to things that are bottled up too long. They can't be satisfied until they can hear that scratch or that tap, and feel that they are once again in the inner circle of those with ink in their blood. ~Elizabeth R. Hartman

Writing: It is a pity that we cannot examine an author's literary entrails, so as to see on what wisdom he has been feeding. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Writing: It is impossible to discourage the real writers — they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write. ~Sinclair Lewis

Writing: It is indeed certain, that whoever attempts any common topick, will find unexpected coincidences of his thoughts with those of other writers; nor can the nicest judgment always distinguish accidental similitude from artful imitation. ~Samuel Johnson

Writing: 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

Writing: It is not my sentence that I polish, but my thought. I pause until the drop of light that I need is formed and falls from my pen. ~Joseph Joubert

Writing: It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories. ~Paul Gallico

Writing: It is plagiarism when you take something out of a book and use it as your own. If you take it out of several books then it is research. ~Ralph Foss

Writing: It is possible to regard Norman Mailer as one of the prices we pay for widespread literacy. ~Richard Gilman

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page. ~Joan Baez

Writing: 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

Writing: It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.) ~Christopher Hitchens

Writing: Journal: fitting your heart and soul into ruled lines. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: Kafka became a model for me, a continuing inspiration. Not only did he exhibit an irrepressible originality-who else would think of things like this!-he seemed to say that only in one's most personal language can the crucial tales of a writer be told. Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel a particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share. ~Anne Rice, 1995

Writing: Let's hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks. ~Peter S. Prescott

Writing: 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

Writing: Lists are the butterfly nets that catch my fleeting thoughts... ~Betsy Canas Garmon

Writing: Literature is the art of using words. This is not a platitude, but a truth of the first importance, a truth so profound that many writers never get down to it... ~Arnold Bennett

Writing: Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. ~James Norman Hall

Writing: Love letters and poems aren't the least bit difficult to write, if you write directly from your heart into the ink and don't channel through your brain first. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: Manuscripts either moulder in your drawer, or mature there. ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach

Writing: 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

Writing: Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. ~Orson Scott Card

Writing: Most editors are failed writers — but so are most writers. ~T.S. Eliot

Writing: My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin. ~Karl Kraus

Writing: My pen has multiple personalities. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma. ~E.B. White

Writing: My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line. ~Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Writing: Never use a figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut out a word, cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, scientific word, or jargon if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. ~George Orwell, 1946

Writing: Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence. ~William Allen White

Writing: No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published. ~Russell Lynes

Writing: No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman. ~Van Wyck Brooks

Writing: 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

Writing: Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence. ~Fay Weldon

Writing: One hates an author that's all author. ~George Gordon, Lord Byron

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: Our live experiences fixed in aphorisms stiffen into cold epigram. Our heart's blood, as we write with it, darkens into ink. ~F.H. Bradley

Writing: Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals. ~Proust

Writing: Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. ~Author Unknown

Writing: Publication - is the auction of the Mind of Man. ~Emily Dickinson

Writing: Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. ~Samuel Johnson

Writing: Reading is for those who are too lazy to write. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. ~Harold Acton

Writing: Some authors write with a grave ink, of a dramatic pen dipped into their dark souls. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: Some books come to you.... They are bonuses, gifts. You do not have to kill some little part of your flesh to dredge them up. This is a fatal shade mystical, but it is almost as if you are serving as agent for a book which wants to get itself written. So the author never knows what to think of such books when he is done. His real fondness — since writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing — is more for those books he delivered out of his own flesh, torn and deadened by the process, but able at least to use all art and craft, all accumulated lore. ~Norman Mailer

Writing: Some writers collect their disjointed ideas from all authors within their reach, just as the paper they write on is made from the tattered rags of all the stuff on earth. ~George Denison Prentice

Writing: Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. ~Hannah Arendt

Writing: Strictly speaking, we have only layers of novels and comedies; few are grown from the seed. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: The author, as a rule, dearly loves every line of his work, from the first stroke down to the dotlet on the (Chicago), March 1886

Writing: The best style is the style you don't notice. ~Somerset Maugham

Writing: The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. ~Agatha Christie

Writing: The book's idea or theme or meaning has been stirring about in your consciousness for months and probably years. When the idea first hits you you feel enormously stimulated and heightened. Then you wish you could get away from it, but now nothing but death can separate you from it. It's no use.... Now everything else in your life takes second place or fades out of your consciousness altogether. Clothes are unimportant, letters go unanswered for days or even weeks, parties you regard with a lackluster eye, travel is a lure to be avoided like death, for it is ruin to the sustained rhythm of your work day. Teeth go unfilled, bodily ills run unchecked, your idea of bliss is to wake up on Monday morning knowing that you haven't a single engagement for the entire week. You are cradled in a white paper cocoon tied up with typewriter ribbon. Awake and asleep the novel is with you, haunting you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of your story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting. ~Edna Ferber

Writing: The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. ~Mark Twain, letter to George Bainton

Writing: The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it. ~William Gass

Writing: The first goal of writing is to have one's words read successfully. ~Robert Brault

Writing: 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

Writing: The good writing of any age has always been the product of neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. ~William Styron, interview

Writing: The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. ~Samuel Johnson

Writing: The idea could even be advanced that style comes to young authors about the time they recognize that life is out there ready to kill them, kill them quickly or slowly, but something out there is not fooling. It would explain why authors who were ill in their childhood almost always arrive early in their career as developed stylists: Proust, Capote, and Alberto Moravia give three examples. Gide offers another. This notion would certainly account for the early and complete development of Hemingway's style. He had the unmistakable sensation of being wounded so near to death that he felt his soul slide out of him, then slip back. The average young author is not that ill in childhood or that harshly used by early life. ~Norman Mailer, preface to 1976 reissue of

Writing: The influence of the platform is much more potent than that of the pen. ~James Lendall Basford

Writing: The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible. ~Washington Irving

Writing: The majority of writers ought to translate themselves; there are but few thoughts that are born translated, that is, clothed with the power best fitted alike to express and transmit them. What we have in the first instance written for ourselves, should be written a second time for others. ~Alexandre Vinet

Writing: 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

Writing: The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. ~Andre Gide

Writing: The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof [$h¡t] detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. ~Ernest Hemingway, interview in , Spring 1958

Writing: The only cure for writer's block is insomnia. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: 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

Writing: The pen sometimes builds a more enduring monument than can the hammer or chisel. ~James Lendall Basford

Writing: The pen- is mightier than the pen. ~James Lendall Basford

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

Writing: 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

Writing: The road to hell is paved with adverbs. ~Stephen King

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

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother's milk and blackens it to make printer's ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with.... Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. ~G. Bernard Shaw

Writing: The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. ~Samuel Johnson

Writing: The universe will do the writing for you, if you just listen close enough. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Writing: The writer who uses weak arguments and strong epithets is like the landlady who gives weak tea and strong butter. ~"Wit and Humor," , March 1879

Writing: 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

Writing: There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters. ~Miguel de Cervantes

Writing: 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

Writing: There is but one element that is constant in the flux of fashions. No matter what cut or what cloth the style of the day imposes, flesh and blood must wear the garment. So with fiction. Now flowery and flowing, now tailor-made and unadorned, words and their weaving follow many models. ~J.B. Kerfoot

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works. ~Robert Burton

Writing: This work shop had a grim look, as if the laborer within it would sacrifice everything to the demands of his toil; changing his life blood into ink if necessary; and his soul into a pen. ~Anna McClure Sholl

Writing: Those who have had experience with type are aware of its satanic persistence towards error. ~Author unknown

Writing: To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make. ~Truman Capote

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

Writing: Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? ~Joan Didion

Writing: We write to remember our nows later. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true. ~Robert Wilensky, 1996

Writing: What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~Logan Pearsall Smith

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told. ~Andre Gide

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: When at times I come across a good idea of mine in one of my old notebooks, I am astonished how foreign it has become to me and my system, and am as delighted with it as if it were the thought of one of my predecessors. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Writing: When her work was done, she ran away to her books with the greatest possible delight. Even when very young, she would hide away with books, pen, ink, and paper, rather than play with her schoolmates. Her father and mother used to wonder what she did with so much paper; but she was too bashful to show what she wrote. Her mother, therefore, was much surprised, when searching in a dark closet, she found a number of little books, made of writing paper, evidently done by a child. The writing consisted of little verses, written to the pictures she had drawn on the opposite page. She cried when she found her treasures had been discovered, and then they were given to her, she took an early opportunity to burn them secretly; this shows how natural it is for people of good sense to be bashful about their own productions. ~Lucretia Maria Davidson

Writing: When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on. ~Karl Kraus, translated from German by Harry Zohn

Writing: When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person. ~Emily Dickinson

Writing: 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

Writing: When she could no longer have Maurice within the bound of vibrating speech, she would gladly have converted her life-blood into ink, that she might send to him the whole course of her life as it flowed. ~"Eugenie de Guerin,"

Writing: When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. ~Enrique Jardiel Poncela

Writing: 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

Writing: When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. ~Jorge Luis Borges

Writing: Why write: It's the only place in my head that's quiet enough to breathe and loud enough to break things.... Waking up at 2am to vomit up poetry and then going back to sleep.... A writer is the closest thing to a human thunderstorm. ~Author Unknown

Writing: With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under ground. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: Words were the only net to catch a mood, the only sure weapon against oblivion. ~Jan Struther

Writing: Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven. ~Walter Benjamin

Writing: Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. ~Francis Bacon

Writing: Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head. ~From the movie

Writing: Writer's block is a disease for which there is no cure, only respite. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: 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. ~Terri Guillemets

Writing: 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

Writing: Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day. ~Richard Price

Writing: 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

Writing: 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

Writing: Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words. ~Norman Mailer, 1998

Writing: Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. ~Sholem Asch

Writing: Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow

Writing: Writing is a struggle against silence. ~Carlos Fuentes

Writing: Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. ~Jules Renard

Writing: Writing is both mask and unveiling. ~E.B. White

Writing: 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

Writing: Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong. ~Jeb Dickerson

Writing: Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. ~Franz Kafka

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

Writing: You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbury

Writing: You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. ~Saul Bellow

Writing: 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

Writing: You're not going into the I'm- a-born-newspaperman-with-ink-in-my-veins-instead-of-blood speech, are you? ~Whit Masterson

Writing: Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. ~Author unknown, commonly misattributed to Samuel Johnson