Writing/Writers Quotes

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Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

- Charles Caleb Colson

Because it's so easy to copy anything, a lot of people have convinced themselves that they shouldn't have to pay for it. Well, the reason you get paid is because the people who sit all day long at their desks creating books and songs and software have mortgages. And if you're only going to sell one copy of everything and then the world is going to make a gazillion pirated copies off of it, it's going to be really hard to pay your mortgage.

- Pat Schroeder

Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom's Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room.

- Anna Garlin Spencer

Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.

- Judy Collins

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

- Jules Renard

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

- Gloria Steinem

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.

- Judy Collins

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

- Joyce Carol Oates

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.

- Quentin Crisp

You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can't teach someone who writes columns to care.

- Ellen Goodman

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

- Thomas Mann

Writing is a voice that calls us from dreams, that peeks out of the corner of our eyes when we think no one is looking, the longing that breaks our hearts even when we think we should be happiest, and to which we cannot give a name.

- Judy Collins

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

- Josh Billings

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.

- Ralph Ellison

I am neither a man nor a woman but an author.

- Charlotte Bronte

Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way.
I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the
appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.

- A. A. Milne

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

- Truman Capote

Living gives you a better understanding of life. I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities. Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art.

- Alan Dean Foster

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.

- Walter Cronkite

With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

- James Thurber

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. You may read selections to sensible women, -- if young the better.

- Amos Bronson Alcott

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write, but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.

- Will Rogers

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

- Aldous Huxley

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk with self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

- Anne Sullivan