Quotes on Writing

He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good

That's the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards," said Mrs. Berman. "You don't write for the whole world, and you don't write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.

Why is a raven like a writing desk? - Mad Hatter I haven't the slightest idea. - Alice

Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes

Ringo: 'I do get emotional when I think back about those times. My make-up is emotional. I'm an emotional human being. I'm very sensitive and it took me till I was forty-eight to realize that was the problem! We were honest with each other and we were honest about the music. The music was positive. It was positive in love. They did write - we all wrote - about other things, but the basic Beatles message was Love.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.

It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.

The secret is writing down one simple line after another.

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something. Not didactic things, but passionate things.

When I am gone what will you do? Who will write and draw for you? Someone smarter--someone new? Someone better--maybe YOU!

Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive her.

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me - the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.

I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular

I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.