Explore Quotes on Writing

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

If you don't like someone's story, write your own.

Remember, it's the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings.

Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

How sweet is the assurance, how comforting is the peace that come from the knowledge that if we marry right and live right, our relationship will continue, notwithstanding the certainty of death and the passage of time. Men may write love songs and sing them. They may yearn and hope and dream. But all of this will be only a romantic longing unless there is an exercise of authority that transcends the powers of time and death.

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

and then there are some who believe that old relationships can be revived and made new again. but please if you feel that way don't phone don't write don't arrive

Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.

I am writing these poems from inside a lion.

There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

When writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence...in love, never settle...value yourself first and this will help you to value others...life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest...everyone in the world is different, and that's ok.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

Controversial' as we all know, is often a euphemism for 'interesting and intelligent.