"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."

Liebling, A. J. on Writers and Writing
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"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."

Franklin, Benjamin on Writers and Writing
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"Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading."

Zinsser, William on Writers and Writing
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"Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators."

Lincoln, Abraham on Ambiguity
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"It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is."

Lemmon, Jack on Writers and Writing
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"We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand."

Lewis, Cecil Day on Writers and Writing
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"I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others."

Moliere on Writers and Writing
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"We all write poems. It is simply that poets are the ones who write in words."

Fowles, John on Poetry and Poets
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"Talent is a matter of quantity. Talent does not write on page, it writes three hundred."

Renard, Jules on Talent
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"Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up."

Hemingway, Ernest on Travel and Tourism
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"You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say."

Unknown, Source on Writers and Writing
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"Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!"

Ferber, Edna on Writers and Writing
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"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."

Updike, John on Critics and Criticism
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"The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another."

Barrie, Sir James M. on Life and Living
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"The best memory is that which forgets nothing, but injuries. Write kindness in marble and write injuries in the dust."

Proverb, Persian on Memory
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"Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."

Irving, John on Fiction
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"I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can."

Hemingway, Ernest on Writers and Writing
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"The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood."

Sontag, Susan on Writers and Writing
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"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing."

Franklin, Benjamin on Fame
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"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time."

Shaw, George Bernard on Writers and Writing
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"No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clich?s that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood."

Maugham, W. Somerset on Books - Bestsellers
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"In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write, but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing."

Rogers, Will on Movies
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"Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic."

Chandler, Raymond on Critics and Criticism
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"Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time."

Raleigh, Sir Walter on History and Historians
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"First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand."

Day-Lewis, Robert Cecil on Creativity
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"The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can't fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar."

Marx, Groucho on Autobiography
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"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

Greene, Graham on Journalism and Journalists
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"If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you."

Parker, Dorothy on Writers and Writing
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"I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't."

Roth, Philip on Autobiography
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"It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio."

Pound, Ezra on Paradise
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"Talk back to your internal critic. Train yourself to recognize and write down critical thoughts as they go through your mind. Learn why these thoughts are untrue and practice talking and writing back to them."

Mckain, Robert J. on Conflict
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"I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't."

Hemingway, Ernest on Airplane and Aviation
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"The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little -- or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives."

Trollope, Anthony on Sarcasm
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"Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say."

Colton, Charles Caleb on Writers and Writing
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"When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools."

Leboeuf, Michael on Concentration
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"It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all."

Chandler, Raymond on Critics and Criticism
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"The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned."

Nemerov, Howard on Writers and Writing
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"The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books."

Cleaver, Eldridge on Dance and Dancing
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"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like."

Benjamin, Walter on Books - Reading
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"Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read; and the"

Pike, Albert on Action
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