Quotes about writers-and-writing

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

— Stephen Vizinczey

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.

— Voltaire

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

— Mary Heaton Vorse

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

— Peter De Vries

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

— Alice Walker

Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.

— Horace Walpole

Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.

— John Wesley

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

— Bill Wheeler

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

— Elwyn Brooks White

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

— Elwyn Brooks White

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

— Elie Wiesel

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

— Oscar Wilde

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

— Oscar Wilde

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

— Oscar Wilde

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

— Thornton Wilder

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

— Virginia Woolf

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

— Virginia Woolf

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

— Virginia Woolf

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

— Virginia Woolf

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

— William Butler Yeats

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

— William Zinsser

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

— William Zinsser

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

— William Zinsser

Writing is thinking on paper.

— William Zinsser

Writing is a craft not an art.

— William Zinsser

As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I’m not sure that I’m going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says ‘you are nothing,’ I will be a writer.

— Hunter S. Thompson

If you don’t write you wrong.

— James Dye

Write even badly One day you will right well.

— Tadj Abelkader

Whenever anyone asks for my autograph, I feel greatly honored. He or she is not only letting me know my work was worth buying and reading, but it's also worth commemorating.

— Lawrence D. Elliott

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

— Alexander Pope

I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.

— Moliere