On writing

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
- Ernest Hemingway

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
- Mark Twain

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
— Maya Angelou

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
— Toni Morrison

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
— Stephen King


"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
— J.D. Salinger

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
— Winston S. Churchill

"Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds."
— Douglas Adams

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury

"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
— Isaac Asimov

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor

"There are books by which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."
— Charles Dickens

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Stephen King

"If you love to write, then write. Don't let your goal be having a novel published, let your goal be enjoying your stories. However, if you finish your story and you want to share it, be brave about it. Don't doubt your story's appeal. If you are a good reader, and you know what is interesting, and your story is interesting to you, then trust in that. If I would have realized that the stories in my head would be as intriguing to others as they were to me, I would probably have started writing sooner. Believe in your own taste."
— Stephenie Meyer

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
— Neil Gaiman

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

"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
— Mark Twain

"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."
— Joss Whedon

"So what? All writers are lunatics!"
— Cornelia Funke

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
— John Steinbeck

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann

"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted."
— Jules Renard

"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."
— Michael Cunningham

"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself."

"You are what you write."
— Helvy Tiana Rosa

"Write what should not be forgotten."
— Isabel Allende

"Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either."
— Meg Cabot

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
— Neil Gaiman

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger. "
— Stephen King

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
— James A. Michener

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
— Albert Camus

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."
— Anaïs Nin

"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write."
— Rainer Maria Rilke