Quotes on Writing

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. ... I have 10 or so, and thats a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil-but there is no way around them.

Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

Words are a lens to focus one's mind.

But there is no end to the praise of books, to the value of the library. Who shall estimate their influence on our population where all the millions read and write ? It is the joy of nations that man can communicate all his thoughts, discoveries and virtues to records that may last for centuries.

Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.

I have fun writing. I don't make it a chore. I don't have to struggle with it.

Everyone has his own sound. I'm not going to presume how to tell anybody how to write.

One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That's kind of important to me, and that's also kind of important to the whole future of the internet... obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

I write books to change the world. Perhaps I can only change one little piece of that world. But if I can empower teachers and good citizens to give these children, who are the poorest of the poor, the same opportunity we give our own kids, then I'll feel my life has been worth it.

A picture is a poem without words

It helps to write down half a dozen things which are worrying me. Two of them, say, disappear; about two of them nothing can be done, so it's no use worrying; and two perhaps can be settled.

He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.