If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
~ Kingsley Amis
I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
~Charles Baudelaire
When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
“His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
~ Hilaire Belloc
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
Nice writing isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to have smooth and pretty language. You have to surprise the reader frequently, you can’t just be nice all the time. Provoke the reader. Astonish the reader. Writing that has no surprises is as bland as oatmeal. Surprise the reader with the unexpected verb or adjective. Use one startling adjective per page.
~ Anne Bernays
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
~ Josh Billings
It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
~ Gerald Brenan
Medicine is my lawful wife. Literature is my mistress.
~ Anton Chekhov
Literary people are forever judging the quality of the mind by the turn of expression.
~ Frank Moore Colby
Writers are too self-centered to be lonely.
~ Richard Condon
The secret of good writing is to say an old thin in new way or to say a new thing an old way.
~ Richard Harding Davis
Nothing is new except arrangement.
~ Will Durant
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
If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.
~ Epictetus
The desire to write grows with writing.
~ Erasmus
Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
~ Gene Fowler
Writing is a struggle against silence.
~ Carlos Fuentes
In order to write about life, first you must live it!
~ Ernest Hemingway
Originality is undetected plagiarism.
~ William Inge
You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.
~ Tracy Kidder
I’ve experienced t he pain and joy of hte birth of babies and the birth of books and there’s nothing like it: when a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or composing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationshiip with those he loves, with the whole world.
~ Madeleine L’Engle, in A Circle of Quiet
Though old the thought and oft exprest,
‘Tis his at last who says it best.
~ James Russell Lowell
Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
~ W. Somerset Maugham
Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.
~ George Moore
Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.
~ John Morley
Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: “The King is dead” and “Jesus wept.”
~ Bill Moyers
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
~ George Orwell
There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.
~ Jules Renard
Words are loaded pistols.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Originality is not saying something new, originality is taking the mundane and remaking it afresh.
~ Kevin Stilley
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
~ Logan Pearsall Smith
There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
~ Red Smith
Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
~ William Styron
Word has somehow got around that the split infinitive is always wrong. That is a piece with the outworn notion that it is always wrong to strike a lady.
~ James Thurber
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
~ Lionel Trilling
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
~ Mark Twain
Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him.
~ Mark Twain
As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
~ Mark Twain
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
~ Voltaire
Be obscure clearly.
~ E. B. White
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
~ Elie Wiesel
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
~ Virginia Woolf
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