Home Quotes for Writers

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

George Kneller "To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted."

Neil Gaiman "It does help, to be a writer, to have the sort of crazed ego that doesn't allow for failure. The best reaction to a rejection slip is a sort of wild-eyed madness, an evil grin, and sitting yourself in front of the keyboard muttering 'Okay, you bastards. Try rejecting this!' and then writing something so unbelievably brilliant that all other writers will disembowel themselves with their pens upon reading it, because there's nothing left to write. Because the rejection slips will arrive. And, if the books are published, then you can pretty much guarantee that bad reviews will be as well. And you'll need to learn how to shrug and keep going. Or you stop, and get a real job."

Benjamin Cavell "The drudgery of being a professional writer comes in trying to make good days out of bad days and in squeezing out the words when they won't just flow.

Pearl S. Buck "If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing."

Ray Bradbury "You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it."

Eudora Welty "Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tired. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough."

Kent Haruf "The things on my desk and on the walls above it connect me emotionally to memories, ways of living, people and geographical areas that are important to me. It's an emotional attachment to all these things that connects me up with the impulse to write."

William Faulkner "Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the most. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."

William Makepeace Thackeray "There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write."

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe "The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before."

John Steinbeck "The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

P.G. Wodehouse "Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed."

Saul Bellow "There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book."

Jack London "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

Leo Rosten "A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others."

Lily King "I try to remember that books get written by writing them. No amount of brooding, sulking, procrastinating or self-flagellation puts words on the page, they appear only by bowing your head down and doing the work."

Robert Bresson "The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine."

Eudora Welty "Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists."

Annie Dillard "One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now ... Some more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

Jeff Kleinman "Associate with all the smart, funny, talented, creative people you can, learn to write beautifully, but don't stay locked in your room to do it: go out and try new things, meet new people, have a wonderful, rich, compelling, and interesting life -- and then tell me about it in the most beautiful prose imaginable."

Erica Jong "To write is to be reborn, to affirm the self, the soul and the creative spirit."

Neil Gaiman "If you want to be a writer, write. You may have to get a day job to keep body and soul together (I cheated, and got a writing job, or lots of them, to feed me and pay the rent). If you aren't going to be a writer, then go and be something else. It's not a god-given calling. There's nothing holy or magic about it. It's a craft that mostly involves a lot of work, most of it spent sitting making stuff up and writing it down, and trying to make what you have made up and written down somehow better."

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