Writing

All quotes are from The Quotation Page


Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
-Robert Heinlein (1907 - 1988)


I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people who are convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.
-Ellen Goodman (1941 - )


The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
-Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)


All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
-Bobby Knight (1940 - )


Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.
-Carol Burnett (1936 - )


Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
-Cyril Connolly (1903 - 1974)


If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.
-Elaine Liner, We Got Naked, Now What, SXSW 2006


The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
-George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)


I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
-Joan Didion (1934 - )


The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
-John Irving (1942 - )


Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
-Jules Renard (1864 - 1910)


Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
-Katherine Paterson, The Spying Heart, 1989


When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned.
-Melanie Benjamin, Alice I Have Been, 2010


I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
-Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)


You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
-Ray Bradbury (1920 - ), advice to writers


If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.
-Real Live Preacher, Real Live Preacher weblog, 07-25-06


See things as they are and write about them. Don’t waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.
-Real Live Preacher, Real Live Preacher weblog, 07-25-06


A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.
-Tom Bissell, Truth in Oxiana, 2004