Top On Writing Quotes

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

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

It's amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this books survives, his ideas live.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each s...

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

It's the Abstract Expressionist approach to publishing. Throw ink at paper. Hope for pattern to emerge.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

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

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

Why one goes on writing when one sees what writing can be - and what one's own writing is not. Aldous Huxley

In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or w...

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning...

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by w...

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.