Quotation Saturday: Writing

quotationsaturday Mamacita says: My obsession with writing has extended itself over into Quotation Saturday!

1. There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. –Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

2. The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. –Anaïs Nin

3. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. –Ray Bradbury

4. Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. –E.L. Doctorow

5. A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. –Charles Peguy

6. And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. –Sylvia Plath

7. If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. –Toni Morrison

8. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. –Logan Pearsall Smith

9. The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. –Norbet Platt

10. It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. –Vita Sackville-West

11. Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. –Sharon O’Brien

12. Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very;” your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. –Mark Twain

13. The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. –Vladimir Nabakov

14. Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. –Anton Chekhov

15. Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. –Orson Scott Card

16. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. –Mark Twain

17. I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. –James Michener

18. If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. –Isaac Asimov

19. Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. –~Nathaniel Hawthorne

20. A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. –Mignon McLaughlin

21. To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make. –Truman Capote

22. I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. –English Professor (Name Unknown), Ohio University (I’ve always wanted to put this on an essay!)

23. Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. –Hannah Arendt

24. It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. –Ann Beattie (Twitter has this same problem.)

25. Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. –Gene Fowler

26. Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. –Francis Bacon

27. Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. –Graycie Harmon

28. Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. –Flannery O’Connor

29. Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn’t we? –Audra Foveo-Alba

30. When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. –Enrique Jardiel Poncela

31. Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. –Sholem Asch

32. If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. –Lord Byron

33. I’d rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. –Jack Smith

34. What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window. –Burton Rascoe (. . . or husband, either.)

35. If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that’s read by persons who move their lips when they’re reading to themselves. –Don Marquis

36. You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. –Arthur Polotnik

37. Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. –Theodore Dreiser

38. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. –Henry David Thoreau

39. It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write. –Sinclair Lewis

40. Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? –Friedrich Nietzsche

41. One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one’s pen. –Leo Tolstoy

42. Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. –Colette

43. One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. –Hart Crane

44. The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it. –Ernest Hemingway

45. There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes. –William Makepeace Thackeray

46. Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it. –David Sedaris

47. The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean. –Robert Louis Stevenson

48. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. –Albert Camus

49. There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people if he’s any good. –F. Scott Fitzgerald

50. Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else. –Gloria Steinem

51. Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters – to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people. –Logan Pearsall Smith

52. The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. –Tom Clancy

53. Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine. –Walter Cronkite

54. Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. –Henry David Thoreau

55. Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write. –Elie Wiesel

56. Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself – it is the occurring which is difficult. –Stephen Leacock

57. You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you’ve got something to say. –F. Scott Fitzgerald

58. You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.–Jack London

59. The beauty of the written word is that it can be held close to the heart and read over and over again. — Florence Littauer

60. I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper. — Steve Martin

. . . and here I must stop, for there are so many wonderful quotations about writing that unless I DO stop now, I never will.

P.S.  #61.  Metaphors are like similes.  –Anonymous  (and some people will not understand this one in the least.  Sad.)


Comments

Quotation Saturday: Writing — 6 Comments

  1. 35. Harlequin Romances? Really now, I must admit that I can compose the smuttiest things you have ever read, but I’d rather not venture into that part of my imagination…bad things happen when I’m there.

    44. Obviously, the shit detector on Stephenie Meyer is broken…I mean…what?

    59. Sometimes, I wonder if something I’ve written and given to someone has been kept throughout the years…and sometimes, I secretly hope that it has.

  2. 35. Harlequin Romances? Really now, I must admit that I can compose the smuttiest things you have ever read, but I’d rather not venture into that part of my imagination…bad things happen when I’m there.

    44. Obviously, the shit detector on Stephenie Meyer is broken…I mean…what?

    59. Sometimes, I wonder if something I’ve written and given to someone has been kept throughout the years…and sometimes, I secretly hope that it has.

  3. #61: I love English teacher humor!!! I have a t-shirt hanging in my closet that says:

    Haikus are easy
    But sometimes they don’t make sense
    Refrigerator

    🙂

  4. #61: I love English teacher humor!!! I have a t-shirt hanging in my closet that says:

    Haikus are easy
    But sometimes they don’t make sense
    Refrigerator

    🙂

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