Quotes on Writing

Repeat your winners. If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling. Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency.

Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.

I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.

Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.

There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

By what he chooses to present and by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental, metaphysical values.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.