
Memorable Quotes
If you don't open your mouth, you don't get fed
"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain."
Louisa May Alcott
"Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly every day."
William Allingham
"Proofread carefully to see if you any words out."
Anonymous
"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top."
Anonymous English Professor
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
Isaac Asimov
"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention."
Francis Bacon
I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.
Erma Bombeck
"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
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
Ray Bradbury
"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make."
Truman Capote
"Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space."
Orson Scott Card
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
Anton Chekhov
"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."
Peter De Vries
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
Benjamin Franklin
"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
Nathaniel Hawthorne
"A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right."
John K. Hutchens
"A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor."
Ring Lardner
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."
Elmore Leonard
"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
Thomas Mann
"I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter."
James Michener
"I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve."
Montesquieu
"If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
Tony Morrison
"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
"Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say."
Sharon O'Brien
"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."
Charles Peguy
"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
"The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it."
Jules Renard
"The wastebasket is a writer's best friend."
Isaac Bashevis Singer
"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."
Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith
"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
"With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs."
James Thurber
"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
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
Mark Twain
"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
"I just wrote a book, but don't go out and buy it yet, because I don't think it's finished yet."
Lawrence Welk
"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
"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all."
Richard Wright
"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public."
Winston Churchill

