Quotes on Writing

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Wherein we discover that many of the "rules" for good writing and good sex are the same: Keep your hand moving, lose control, and don't think.

There is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn't write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn't any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.

I will write a book one day about how I feel about every aspect of Emily Stone. She's a full genius. She has found her genius and is giving it all so fully and beautifully. I think everyone who works with her, brushes shoulders with her, or even makes eye contact with her, gets a shot of sunshine.

I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.

I think the moment you start trying to please a fan base is when you start going downhill. I'm going to always, always write about what I want, even if it doesn't necessarily cater to most of them.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

And you know there’s nothing like writing a song about someone who’s mean to you, and just makes your life miserable…and then winning a Grammy for it.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Write it down and remember that we never gave in, the mind of a child is where the revolution begins, so if the solution has never been to look in yourself, how is it that you expect to find it anywhere else

You'll have days of complete lack of faith in your abilities. But you have to keep coming back. That's when you know you're a writer - when you take the failures and appear at the desk again, over and over again.

Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

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.

Build your own pyramids, write your own hieroglyphs.

You're...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.