Writing Quotes

The goal of reading and writing is to live better.

Dominique Loreau

I have made this [letter] longer than usual only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Blaise Pascal

If writing did not exist, what terrible depressions we should suffer from.

Sei Shonagon

Writing is a craft, being an author is work, and having readers and a following is a gift.

Michael J Kannengieser

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

Saul Bellow

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

Katherine Ann Porter

Brevity leads us to the truth of things.

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Art can't be taught; passion can't be taught...but craft can be taught. And writing is both an art and a craft.

Elizabeth George

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

Enrique Jardiel Poncela

A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

Aldous Huxley

An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way, an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.

Charles Bukowski

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Ray Bradbury

Write something to suit yourself, and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody, and scarcely anyone will care for it.

Jessie Stuart

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jnr

There’s a good power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.

Josh Billings

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

Hector Berlioz

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time…the wait is simply too long.

Leonard Bernstein

The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.

Galen

Think of the words we use as a house. Use them with as much love and care as possible to keep a trace of all the little nothings that make up our lives.

Dominique Loreau

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

Samuel Butler

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

Stephen King

Bill Gates is a very rich man today…and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.

Dave Barry

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the

Poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Shakespeare

Writing, correcting, editing, clarifying, refining…the work of deleting, of filtering, of gradually trimming back the superfluous as we aspire towards the essential.

Dominique Loreau

The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.

Blaise Pascal

Of every four word I write, I strike out three.

Nicolas Boileau

If all the earth were paper white

And all the sea were ink

‘Twere not enough for me to write

As my poor heart doth think.

John Lyly

Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Samuel Johnson

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

American Proverb

Prose = words in their best order. Poetry = the best words in the best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.

Matthew Arnold

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

Jeremy Bentham

It could be said of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other men’s flowers, providing of my own only the string that ties them together.

Montaigne

They lard their lean books with the fat of other men’s works.

Robert Burton

Make copies, young man, many copies. You can only become a good artist by copying the masters.

Jean Ingres

Everything has been said before, but because nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

Andre Gide

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Oscar Wilde

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

T S Eliot

If you steal from one author, its plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.

Wilson Mizner

Not a day without a line.

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter…a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

Henri Matisse

Like a sculpture that exists only in the head of a sculptor and needs to be moulded into physical shape, to get a life, writing gives shape and life to fuzzy ideas in my head.

If I ever have children, I want them to be books.

The lyf so short, the craft so long to learne.

Chaucer

One of the great diseases of this age is the multitude of books that doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is everyday hatched and brought into the world.

Barnaby Rich, 1600

Writer’s block – not a lack of inspiration but an excess of connectedness.

I am like one who with much labour extracts precious gems from the innumerable sands of the seashore, or one who, walking through spacious gardens, plucks the useful and the virtuous from among the worthless and fruitless plants, separating the lilies and roses from the nettles and brambles.

Gerald of Wales, c. 1197

Writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

Alain de Botton

To have sitzfleisch means the ability to sit still for the long periods of time required to be truly productive; it means the stamina to work through a difficult situation and see a project through to the end.

The best way to learn a subject is to write a book about it.

Write the way you talk. Naturally.

David Ogilvy

Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

David Ogilvy

Conciseness is the sister of talent.

Anton Chekov

One form of originality is creation. Another form is synthesis. People often focus so much on creating new ideas that they overlook the value of synthesizing ideas from different sources. Innovation usually mean connecting previously unconnected concepts.

James Clear

Synthesizing is the process whereby a student merges new information with prior knowledge to form a new idea, perspective, or opinion to generate insight.

Synthesising involves combining ideas from a range of sources in order to group and present common ideas or arguments.

Synthesis is the most complex of the reading strategies. Synthesizing lies on a continuum of evolving thinking. Synthesizing runs the gamut from taking stock of meaning while reading to achieving new insight.

Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.

William Zinsser

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Isaac Asimov

There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.

Mason Cooley

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Clarence Day

Collect as precious pearls the words of the wise and virtuous.

Abd El-Kader

Make books your companions; let your bookshelves be your gardens: bask in their beauty, gather their fruit, pluck their roses, take their spices and myrrh.

Samuel ben Judah ign Tibbon

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever.

Martin Farqhuar Tupper

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.

Charles W Eliot

First delight, then instruct.

It is not many books that make men learned, nor even reading. But it is a good book, frequently read, no matter how small it is, that makes a man learned in the Scriptures and godly.

Martin Luther

It does not matter how many books you may have, but whether they are good or not.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.

Charles de Montesquieu

A book is a thing among things, a volume lost among the volumes that populate the indifferent universe, until it meets its reader, the person destined for its symbols.

Borges

The less I clog up my life with needless busy-ness, the better I find I write. Therefore I will do as little as possible.

Vikram Seth

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

Mark Twain

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

Goethe

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself – it is the occurring which is difficult.

Stephen Leacock

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

Every writer writes to change the world.

The right words can be transformative. They can shake a heart. They can reimagine the world.

Lucinda Holdforth

As long as we hope for a better way to live, we will need words to show us the right direction and inspire us to take the journey.

Lucinda Holdforth

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann

The man whose book is filled with quotations, has been said to creep along the shores of authors, as if he were afraid to trust himself to the free compass of reasoning; I would rather defend such authors by a different allusion, and ask whether honey is the worse for being gathered by many flowers.

J P F Ancillon

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

American Proverb

Writing is a picture of the writer’s heart.

Chinese Proverb

Cacoethes scribendi – an irrestistable desire to write.

Disjecta membra – scattered fragments, especially of a written work.

The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.

Blaise Pascal

Of every four words I write, I strike out three.

Nicolas Boileau

Writing, when properly managed…is but a different name for conversation.

Laurence Sterne

Think much, say little, write less.

Calmet

Memory is good, but writing better.

Abul Fazel

Without writing where would be history!

Astle

The value of writings consist in their accuracy.

Demophilus

If a writing be good, multiply the good by printing.

A J Panckoucke

Of all things avoid the fault of good authors who write too long.

Le Sage

Writing, when one gets used to it, is as easy as talking or walking.

P Bales

Brevity of expression is a distinguishing merit in all sententious writing.

N Macdonald

Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.

Rousseau

Get the way of writing correctly and justly, and time and use will teach you to write readily afterwards.

Atterbury

Writing is painting invisible words, giving substance and colour to immaterial thought, enabling the dumb to talk to the deaf.

Chatfield

A great writer benefits us in two ways – by revealing to us the mysteries of our own souls, and the wonders of the external world.

Anne E Lynch

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

Wordsworth

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes.

Montesquieu

Brevity is in writing what charity is to all the other virtues; righteousness is worth nothing without the one, nor authorship without the other.

Sydney Smith

A man may be concise and utter much at the same time, especially in writing; for in conversation a great talker and a sayer of nothing do generally signify but one and the same thing.

Coste

Writing grows a habit…there are millions of men who have never written a book, but few who have written only one.

Byron

We are ashamed to have it seen that we write slowly and with much labour, but most good writers do this; words are cheap, and to be had in abundance, it is true, but not the words that breathe and thoughts that burn

Bovee

The habit of committing our thoughts to writing is a powerful means of expanding the mind, and producing a logical and systematic arrangement of our views and opinions; it is this which gives the writer a vast superiority, as to the accuracy and extent of his conceptions, over the mere talker; no one can ever hope to know the principles of any art or science thoroughly who does not write as well as read upon the subject.

R Blakey

Of all the productions and inventions of human wit, none is more admirable and useful than writing, by means whereof a man may copy out his very thoughts, utter his mind without opening his mouth, and signify his pleasure at a thousand miles distance.

E Palmer