Quotes on Writing

There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.
- Brian Aldiss

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
- Matthew Arnold

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
- Russell Baker

A best seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.
- S. Boorstein

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
- Orson Scott Card

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
- Joan Cocteau

People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
- Harlan Ellison

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
- Gustave Flaubert

Half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at.
- David Gerrold

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
- Ernest Hemingway

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
- Eugene Ionesco

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.
- Fran Lebowitz

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
- Frederich Nietzsche

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.
- Blaise Pascal

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
- Jean-Paul Sartre

Writing is thinking on paper.
- William Zinsser