This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.
-Oscar Wilde  

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
-Steve Martin


Thought flies and words go on foot
- Julien Green


 am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.
- Washington Irving


For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as book once it is written...she is rather like a cat wholse kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in them, but now they seem hardly to belong to her - and probably she is involved with another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.
- Rumer Godden


How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
- Henry David Thoreau


It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
- Anais Nin


A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
- Virginia Woolfe


Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
- Gene Fowler


Rewriting ripens what you've written.
-Duane Alan Hahn


The pen is mightier than the sword
-Edward Bulwer-Lytton


A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
-Richard Bach


Pen, paper, perseverance, and proficiency.
-Duane Alan Hahn


I write when I'm inspired, and see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.
-Peter De Vries


If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
-Kingsley Amis


Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
-Benjamin Franklin


To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
-Charles Caleb Colton


While tight with concentration on what is being written, the writer has a thought, an insight, a partially articulate concept. The natural response is to think, "I can't stop what I am writing. I'll remember the idea," and continue writing. The writer is wrong. He will not remember it. The thought, the insight, the concept will disappear. It may return, but you will not need it then, or recall when it might have been appropriate.

Insights and perceptions pass through the mind like fleet fireflies. Lit for an instant, then gone back into the dark. They are precious, irreplaceable. Stop what you are writing and write them into a notebook, onto a napkin, a scrap of paper. ANYWHERE. They are more important than what you are writing now. What you are writing now is there. It is visible, tangible. You will not lose the mood, the flow, the roll.

-From the book, "Dare to be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction" by Leonard Bishop


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


There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together.
-Josh Billings


I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
-Truman Capote


The first draft of anything is shit.
-Ernest Hemingway


Write it, even if you think it's terrible. Don't prevent yourself from jotting down a word, phrase, or paragraph just because it "isn't quite right" or "it won't work." Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but it's better to write it down, you can always edit later. And you don't want to stop yourself before you even get started! The point isn't to use everything you write. You can't be expected to pop out perfect prose your first time out! Write now, edit later.
-Cristine Grace (adapted)


Review. Reread. Rewrite.
-George Mair


Rereading reveals rubbish and redundancy.
-Duane Alan Hahn


It is my ambition to say in ten sentences; what others say in a whole book.
-Friedrich Nietzsche


A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
-Thomas Mann


Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
-Edna Ferber


I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
-Peter De Vries


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


If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
-Quentin Crisp


Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.
-Paul J. Meyer


I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
-William Faulkner


I write to teach myself what I already know.
-Duane Alan Hahn


First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
-Robert Cecil Day-Lewis


We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson


The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.
-Richard Harding Davis


The most original of authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something, as if it had never been said before.
-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe


If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research.
-Wilson Mizner


The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
-John Steinbeck


Unless a writer lives with a periodic delusion of his greatness, he will not continue writing. He must believe, against all reason and evidence, that the public will experience a catastrophic loss if he does not complete his novel. The public is just clamoring to give him his fame.

-From the book, "Dare to be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction" by Leonard Bishop


An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
-Benjamin Disraeli


Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.
-Leo Rosten


Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
-Daphne Du Maurier


What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.
-Edward Dahlberg

If you have any quotes that you would like to share on this page,
please email me at rachel@kundavega.com and I will be happy to add them.