Writers' Quotes

I try to create sympathy for my
characters, then turn the monsters
loose.
– Stephen King
Prose is architecture, not interior
decoration.
– Ernest Hemingway
It’s none of their business that you
have to learn to write. Let them think
you were born that way.
– Ernest Hemingway
Most writers regard the truth as their
most valuable possession, and
therefore are most economical in its
use.
– Mark Twain
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.
– William Shakespeare (from A
Midsummer Night’s Dream)
If you can tell stories, create
characters, devise incidents, and have
sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter
a damn how you write.
– Somerset Maugham
To produce a mighty book, you must
choose a mighty theme.
– Herman Melville
It is perfectly okay to write garbage—
as long as you edit brilliantly.
– C. J. Cherryh
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
Any man who keeps working is not a
failure. He may not be a great writer,
but if he applies the old-fashioned
virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll
eventually make some kind of career
for himself as writer.
– Ray Bradbury
A blank piece of paper is God’s way of
telling us how hard it to be God.
– Sidney Sheldon
Not that the story need be long, but it
will take a long while to make it short.
– Henry David Thoreau
If you have other things in your life—
family, friends, good productive day
work—these can interact with your
writing and the sum will be all the
richer.
– David Brin
My own experience is that once a
story has been written, one has to
cross out the beginning and the end. It
is there that we authors do most of
our lying.
– Anton Chekhov
I have been successful probably
because I have always realized that I
knew nothing about writing and have
merely tried to tell an interesting story
entertainingly.
– Edgar Rice Burroughs
First, find out what your hero wants,
then just follow him!
– Ray Bradbury
Most of the basic material a writer
works with is acquired before the age
of fifteen.
– Willa Cather
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing
sound they make as they fly by.
– Douglas Adams
Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.
– Ayn Rand
Poetry creates the myth, the prose
writer draws its portrait.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
A writer without interest or sympathy
for the foibles of his fellow man is not
conceivable as a writer.
– Joseph Conrad
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to
say, really do not know anything.
– Philip K. Dick
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
Half my life is an act of revision.
– John Irving
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
People do not deserve to have good
writing, they are so pleased with bad.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I went for years not finishing anything.
Because, of course, when you finish
something you can be judged.
– Erica Jong
Don’t try to figure out what other
people want to hear from you; figure
out what you have to say. It’s the one
and only thing you have to offer.
– Barbara Kingsolver
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just begins
to live that day.
– Emily Dickinson
Writing a novel is like driving a car at
night. You can only see as far as your
headlights, but you can make the
whole trip that way.
– E. L. Doctorow
Get it down. Take chances. It may be
bad, but it’s the only way you can do
anything really good.
– William Faulkner
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
There’s no money in poetry, but then
there’s no poetry in money either.
– Robert Graves
It is the writer who might catch the
imagination of young people, and plant
a seed that will flower and come to
fruition.
– Isaac Asimov
The work never matches the dream of
perfection the artist has to start with.
– William Faulkner
Begin with an individual, and before
you know it you have created a type;
begin with a type, and you find you
have created – nothing.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writing is its own reward.
– Henry Miller
The unread story is not a story; it is
little black marks on wood pulp. The
reader, reading it, makes it live: a live
thing, a story.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Almost anyone can be an author; the
business is to collect money and fame
from this state of being.
– A. A. Milne
A wounded deer leaps the highest.
– Emily Dickinson
Only in men’s imagination does every
truth find an effective and undeniable
existence. Imagination, not invention,
is the supreme master of art as of life.
– Joseph Conrad
Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.
– Anthony Burgess
Writers are always selling somebody
out.
– Joan Didion
Anecdotes don’t make good stories.
Generally I dig down underneath them
so far that the story that finally comes
out is not what people thought their
anecdotes were about.
– Alice Munro
You learn by writing short stories.
Keep writing short stories. The
money’s in novels, but writing short
stories keeps your writing lean and
pointed.
– Larry Niven