20. Famous quotations on the writing life

Two dozen famous quotations on writing

All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
Bobby Knight (1940 - )

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

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Robert Heinlein (1907 - 1988)

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Edwin Schlossberg

If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.
Elaine Liner,

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.
George Burns (1896 - 1996)

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.
H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946)

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
Isabel Colegate

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.
Jesse Stuart

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion 1934 - )

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
Josh Billings (1818 - 1885)

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Jules Renard (1864 - 1910)

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
Leo Rosten (1908 - )

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

See things as they are and write about them. Don’t waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.
Real Live Preacher, Real Live Preacher weblog, 07-25-06

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you’re doing, or it comes out flat. You can’t fake your way through this.
Real Live Preacher, RealLivePreacher.com Weblog, January

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.
Samuel Goldwyn (1882 - 1974)

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784), from Boswell's Life of Johnson

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Stephen King (1947 - )

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
Stephen King (1947 - )

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)