Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.  ~Leo TolstoyPL

The process of writing has something infinite about it.  Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.  ~Elias Canetti

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

A writer and nothing else:  a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.  ~John K. Hutchens, New York Herald Tribune, 10 September 1961LCD

Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn’t we?  ~Terri Guillemets

A good style should show no signs of effort.  What is written should seem a happy accident.  ~W. Somerset Maugham, Summing Up, 1938LCD

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood.  I’d type a little faster.  ~Isaac AsimovDCMOO

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.  ~André Gide, Journals, 1894LCD

Writing, I think, is not apart from living.  Writing is a kind of double living.  The writer experiences everything twice.  Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.  ~Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957LCD

I write because I’m afraid to say some things out loud. ~Gordon Atkinson, reallivepreacher.com

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.  ~Ralph Waldo EmersonRDB; PMB

The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.  ~Agatha ChristieLCE

I’d rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer.  ~Jack Smith

If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.  ~Lord Byron

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.  ~Mark Twain, letter to George Bainton, 1888 (Thanks, Andrew & Barbara), variation of Josh Billings’ "Don’t mistake vivacity for wit, thare iz about az much difference az thare iz between lightning and a lightning bug."

It’s not plagiarism – I’m recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do.  ~Uniek Swain

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? ~Joan Didion

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.  ~Orson Scott Card

Writing is a struggle against silence.  ~Carlos Fuentes

Be obscure clearly.  ~E.B. White SD

Caress your phrase tenderly: it will end by smiling at you. ~Anatole France

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1851MBT

Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals.  ~Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927LCD

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.  ~Sholem Asch

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.  ~John UpdikePL

One hates an author that’s all author.  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Beppo", stanza 75; BMC

Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs. ~Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction, 1991TPVgb p.14

Novelists… fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.  ~Fay WeldonPL

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.  ~Anaïs Nin

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.  ~E.L. Doctorow

Books want to be born: I never make them.  They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.  ~Samuel ButlerPL

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 EllisCUL

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.  ~Vladimir Nabakov

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.  ~Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947LCD

Write your first draft with your heart.  Re-write with your head.  ~From the movie Finding Forrester

Write down the thoughts of the moment.  Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.  ~Francis Bacon

Let me walk through the fields of paper
touching with my wand
dry stems and stunted
butterflies….
~Denise Levertov, "A Walk through the Notebooks"

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.  ~Miguel de CervantesQSO

Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer.  But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.  ~Colette, Casual Chance, 1964LCD

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.  ~Lord Byron

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

I hate writing, I love having written.  ~Dorothy Parker, may not be exact wordingGloria Steinem in PL no no

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed.  I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty:  at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.  ~Dylan Thomas, letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938

Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

The debit is mutual; a great writer [A] great writer creates his precursors.  ~Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, translated from SpanishLa deuda es mutua; un gran escritor crea a sus precursores

When I don’t make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on. ~Karl Kraus, translated from German by Harry Zohn

Writing is both mask and unveiling.  ~E.B. WhitePL

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you.  And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.  ~Arthur Polotnik

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.  ~Stephen King

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction.  By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.  ~Mark Twain

The good writers touch life often.  The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.  The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.  ~Ray Bradbury

Authors are magpies, echoing each other’s words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters.  ~Bergen Evans

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.  ~Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907, ch. 31, MBT p101

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.  ~Hannah Arendt

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life.  ~James Norman HallCUL

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

Every word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.  ~Etty Hillesum, quoted in Ten Fun Things to Do Before You Die by Karol Jackowski

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.  ~Russell LynesCUL

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one’s pen.  ~Leo TolstoyPL

We write to remember our nows later. ~Terri Guillemets

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don’t remove it ? I might be writing in my dreams. ~Terri Guillemets

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.  ~Alfred Kazin, Think, February 1963LCD; In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself; to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratifications, is a curious anticlimax. ~Alfred Kazin, DR, LCE

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.  ~Vita Sackville-West

Being an author is being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.  ~Terri Guillemets

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.  ~Hart CranePL

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.  ~Washington Irving

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.  ~Chateaubriand, Le Génie du Christianisme, 1802LCD

Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially. ~A. Bronson AlcottConcord Days, April: Scholarship. April 28, 1872; CTO

Easy reading is damn hard writing.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Publication – is the auction of the Mind of Man.  ~Emily DickinsonLCE

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them.  The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.  ~Joan Baez

The best style is the style you don’t notice.  ~Somerset MaughamPL

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.  ~Franz KafkaPL

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.  ~Samuel Johnson

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle.  ~John Cheever(1912 – 1982) US short-story writer, novelist Accepting National Medal for Literature; recalled on his death 18 Jun 1982

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.  ~Elmore Leonard

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "All Trivia," Afterthoughts, 1931PMB, p235

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?  ~Friedrich NietzschePL

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

Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.  ~Author Unknown

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.  ~Van Wyck BrooksPL

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet.  So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.  ~Samuel McChord Crothers, "Every Man’s Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else," The Dame School of Experience, 1920

Writing is a product of silence.  ~Carrie Latet

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.  ~Samuel JohnsonPL

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.  ~Karl KrausCUL

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.  ~Harold RossFD

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute.  Or you might not write the paragraph at all.  ~Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf, 1927LCD

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one. ~Baltasar Gracián, translated from Spanishmbt; Baltasar Gracian y Morales, Baltasar Graci?n y Morales

The first goal of writing is to have one’s words read successfully.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

What would there be in a story of happiness?  Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.  ~André GideSD

Every writer I know has trouble writing. ~Joseph Heller

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.  ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958LCD