Quotes, aphorisms and phrases about writing, or about the act of tracing on paper or other suitable surface the graphic signs of a specific writing system, usually used to express thoughts or other particular concepts.
Quotes about writing
- When one fails in anything else, he usually starts writing. (William Somerset Maugham)
- Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. (Benjamin Franklin)
- Good writers often touch life. The mediocre touch it with an elusive hand. Bad writers exacerbate it and then abandon it. (Ray Bradbury)
- There are people who are good enough to write two books at the same time: the first and the last. (Mark Twain)
- A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. (GK Chesterton)
- Being without literary talent is not a dishonor at all. It is a deficiency common to many wise, educated, noble and even highly gifted people in other fields. By writing that a text has no value, we therefore do not intend to offend anyone, nor to take away their trust in life. (Wislawa Szymborska)
- Write something to please yourself and many people will like it; write something to please everyone and it will hardly be of interest to anyone. (Jesse Stuart)
- Will I finally write a book one day in front of which I will not have the right to be disgusted? (Jean Rostand)
- Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the reflection of its light in the shattered glass. (Anton Checov)
- To write that essential book, the only true book, a great writer does not have, in the common sense of the word, to invent it, as it already exists in each of us, but to translate it. The duty and task of a writer are those of a translator. (Marcel Proust)
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- The description begins in the imagination of the writer, but should end in that of the reader. (Stephen King)
- I would prefer to write 10,000 notes rather than a single letter of the alphabet. (Ludwig van Beethoven)
- Strip your heart, and people will listen to you for that - and only that is interesting. (Joseph Conrad)
- I'm that damned type of person who barely writes seven words and deletes five. (Dorothy Parker)
- Fill your sheet with the breaths of your heart. (William Wordsworth)
- The art of writing is to omit, omit, omit. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- Writing is an act of faith, not a grammar trick. (EB White)
- Glory and merit of certain men is to write well; of some others is not to write at all. (Jean de La Bruyère)
- A writer does not write only when he is at a table, he writes all day, when he thinks, when he reads, when he experiences. It stores every sensation, every person it meets. He writes when he has breakfast. He writes when he makes love. A full-time job. (William Somerset Maugham)
- You should write every time how you wrote for the first and last time. Say how good it would be for a leave and say it as well as for a debut. (Karl Kraus)
- Write down the emotions you fear most. (Laurie Halse Anderson)
- It is better not to know how to read or write than to know how to read and write, and not to be capable of anything else. (William Hazlitt)
- An ounce of talent is good support if you want to become a writer, but the only authentic requirement is the ability to remember the story of each scar. (Stephen King)
- To laugh at the things already said and to make people believe to hear them for the first time, in this consists the art of writing, as all the art of living is to relive, as all the art of loving is to love again. (Remy de Gourmont)
- When writing a novel, a writer must create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. (Ernest Hemingway)
- Writing is a busy time. (Johann Wolfgang Goethe)
- I could easily invent a book to excite critics, to excite millions of people instead is difficult. (Michael Crichton)
- Writing is a form of therapy; Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint manage to escape the madness, melancholy, panic, which is inherent in the human condition. (Graham Greene)
- How can I make my wife understand that even when I look out the window I am working? (Joseph Conrad)
- Planning to write is not writing.Sketch ... research ... talk to people about what you're doing, none of these things is writing. To write is to write. (Edgar Lawrence Doctorow)
- Writing is the only profession where nobody considers you ridiculous if you don't make money. (Jules Renard)
- There are three reasons to become a writer: the first is that you need money; the second that you have something to say that the world should know; the third is that you just don't know what to do on long winter evenings. (Quentin Crisp)
- David's room was the writer's classic, spartan cell: desk, chair, mattress on the floor, stacks of books everywhere. (Ken Dornstein)
- A writer who does not contradict himself, leaves too little to do to his commentators. (Jean Rostand)
- Being a writer is a very particular type of work: it is always you against a white sheet of paper (or a white screen) and very often the piece of white paper wins. (Neil Gaiman)
- Writing: hovering over the abyss held only by grammar. (Heimito von Doderer)
- Already near the garden door, the writer suddenly came back. He ran into the house, rushed up to his study and replaced one word with another. (Peter Handke)
Aphorisms on writing
- The scariest moment is always before you start writing. (Stephen King)
- There are no moral books or immoral books. There are well written books and badly written books, and nothing else. (Oscar Wilde)
What a brilliant idea he had come up with, what painful notes had resulted. Words spoil thought, paper makes it ridiculous, and while one would be content to put something ruined and ridiculous on paper, memory lets even this ruined and ridiculous escape. Paper transforms an extraordinary thing into an unimportant thing, into a ridiculousness - said Konrad. (Thomas Bernhard)
- Exercise the muscle of writing every day, even if it is only a letter, a note, a list of titles, a sketch, a diary note. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles freeze. (Jane Yolen)
- I learned on my skin that it takes very little, in the art of writing, to communicate a quantity of things and that, on the other hand, a quantity of words can also communicate very little. (Muriel Spark)
- Writing is a way of speaking without being interrupted. (Jules Renard)
- What you write with difficulty, you read easily. (Vladimir Nabokov)
- I write to give me strength. I write to be the characters that are not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. (Joss Whedon)
- A writer should strive to write something in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of those who read it. (Ernest Hemingway)
- Writing is presenting things in their truth. To say the real thing, the succession of movements and facts that produce the emotion, and which remains valid for a year and for ten years or, if you have been lucky and if you have expressed it with great purity, forever. (Ernest Hemingway)
- Writing is like kissing, only without lips. To write is to kiss with the mind. (Daniel Glattauer)
- To write well you have to skip intermediate ideas just enough to not be boring; but not too much, to avoid not being understood. (Montesquieu)
- My ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in an entire book, what anyone else does NOT say in an entire book. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
- When I get the idea for a story, I start writing it. Before I start, however, I always ask myself a question: "What makes this story so important to be written?" (Stephen King)
- Writing better also means thinking better. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
- Writing has nothing to do with making money, becoming famous, creating gallant occasions, engaging in a fuck or making friends. In the end it is above all a way to enrich the lives of those who will read your works and at the same time enrich their own. To write is to stand up, get in place and feel good. Give yourself happiness, okay? Give yourself happiness. (Stephen King)
- When you feel unable to write, you feel exiled from yourself. (Harold Pinter)
- A man cannot write well unless he is also a good reader. (Clement Marot)
- True alchemists don't change lead into gold; they change the world into words. (William H. Gass)
- If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time or tools to write. (Stephen King)
- No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. (Robert Frost)
- The more offended you are by time, the more you want to escape it. Writing a flawless page, or even a single sentence, raises you above becoming and its corruptions. Death is transcended with the search for the indestructible through the verb, through the very symbol of transience. (EM Cioran)
- I am one of those who absolutely needs to write them to understand things. (Haruki Murakami)
- Anyone who has something new and important to say is keen to make themselves understood. He will therefore do everything possible to write in a simple and understandable way. Nothing is easier than difficult writing. (Karl Popper)
- Writing a book is an adventure: in the beginning it is fun, then it becomes a lover, then a master, and finally a tyrant. The last phase is the one in which, just as you are getting used to your servitude, you kill the monster and throw it to the public. (Winston Churchill)
- Those who write clearly have readers, those who write ambiguously have commentators. (Albert Camus)
- I understood that the books are never finished, that it is possible for some stories to continue writing without their author. (Paul Auster)
- Every poem is mysterious; nobody knows entirely what he has been allowed to write. (Jorge Luis Borges)
- All writers are poor idiots. This is why they write. (Charles Bukowski)
- The pages are still empty, but there is a kind of miraculous sensation that the words are there, written in invisible ink and that are clamoring to become visible. (Vladimir Nabokov)
- Writing is total solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. (Franz Kafka)
- Writing is always hiding something so that it is then discovered. (Italo Calvino)
- Writing a book is a terrible and exhausting struggle like the attack of a long and painful disease. One would not undertake such a thing if it were not led by some demon whom one cannot resist and cannot understand. (George Orwell)
- Writing well is always swimming underwater and holding your breath. (Francis Scott Fitzgerald)
- Writing is a delicious agony. (Gwendolyn Brooks)
- Of all that is written I love only what one writes in blood. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
- Writing is not a profession, but a vocation to unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy. (Georges Simenon)
Phrases about writing
- There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never know where they will take you. (Beatrix Potter)
- If you can't annoy anyone, writing is useless. (Kingsley Amis)
- Better to write for yourself and not have public, than to write for the public and not have yourself. (Cyril Connolly)
- Writing demands discouraging virtues, efforts, patience; it is a solitary activity in which the public exists only as hope. (Simone De Beauvoir)
- If you don't breathe through writing, if you don't cry in writing, or sing while writing, then don't write, because our culture doesn't need it. (Anais Nin)
- For me, writing is taking death out of your pocket, throwing it against the wall and catching it on the fly. (Charles Bukowski)
- Only one half of the book is written, the other half must be taken care of by the reader. (Joseph Conrad)
- Once upon a time books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Today books are written by the public and read by anyone. (Oscar Wilde)
- I am crazy about the books that when you finished reading them you would like the author to be your best friend, to phone him every time. (J.D. Salinger)
- Everyone has a book in them, but in most cases, that's where it should stay. (Christopher Hitchens)
- Man builds houses because he is alive, but writes books because he knows he is mortal. (Daniel Pennac)
- All the writers or painters I have known, none excluded, were shameless self-promoters, cowards, ready to lie for a plate of lentils, stingy and stingy and willing to do anything for a little glory. (Mordecai Richler)
- Writing is the unknown. Before writing, nothing is known about what you are about to write and in full lucidity. (Marguerite Duras)
- Why do some people write? Because it doesn't have enough character to not write. (Karl Kraus)
- There is nothing special about writing. You just have to sit in front of the typewriter and start bleeding. (Ernest Hemingway)
- Write to please only one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will take pneumonia. (Kurt Vonnegut)
- If you want to be a writer, there are two basic exercises: reading and writing a lot. I don't know any tricks to get around these realities, I don't know any shortcuts. (Stephen King)
- A good writer is not recognized as much by what he publishes as by what he throws in the wastepaper basket. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
- The six golden rules of writing: reading, reading, reading and writing, writing, writing. (Ernest Gaines)
- A scrupulous writer, for each sentence he composes, will ask himself at least four questions, namely: what am I trying to say? with what words can I express it? which images or expressions will make it clearer? is the image I am about to use current enough to elicit the desired effect? (George Orwell)
- I was all morning to add a comma, and in the afternoon I took it off. (Oscar Wilde)
- Read, read, read. Read everything - junk, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You will absorb. Then write. If it is good you will see it. If not, throw everything out of the window. (William Faulkner)
- Tomorrow could be hell, but today was a good day of writing, and on good days of writing nothing else matters. (Neil Gaiman)
- I wrote about the silences, the nights, I wrote down the inexpressible. I was dizzy. (Arthur Rimbaud)
- I am convinced that every human being was born to write a book, and nothing else. A brilliant book or a mediocre book, it does not matter, but the one who will not write anything is a lost being, has done nothing but pass on earth without leaving a trace. (Ágota Kristóf)
- Writing is a disease, like a pearl. (Robert Musil)
- Writing is nothing more than a dream that brings advice. (Jorge Luis Borges)
- You have to browse an entire library to write a book. (Samuel Johnson)
- Writing is, for me, the attempt to bring order to the world that I feel like a labyrinth, as an asylum. (Friedrich Durrenmatt)
- The art of writing consists in making the reader forget that we are using words. (Henri Bergson)
- I can shake everything off as I write; my pains disappear, my courage is reborn. (Anne Frank)
- Writing is not communicating with the reader, it is not even communicating with yourself, but communicating with the inexpressible. (Max Frisch)
- All you have to do is write a real sentence. Write the truest sentence you know. (Ernest Hemingway)
- Perhaps there is some other way of writing, but I only know this: at night, when fear does not let me sleep. (Franz Kafka)
- The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way. (Richard Harding Davis)
- I write for the same reason I breathe - because, if I didn't, I would die. (Isaac Asimov)
- Everything in life can be written if you have the guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy of creativity is insecurity. (Sylvia Plath)
