17 quotes about writing

writing
Easy reading is damned hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

…I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write…
Robert A. Heinlein

Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators.
Albert Camus

Writing historical fiction is a legitimate use of Multiple Personality disorder.
Peggy Ullman Bell

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you’re gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.
Woody Allen

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
Mark Twain

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy
(paraphrasing Mark Twain)

A great many people think they are thinking when they are acutally rearranging their prejudices.
William James

A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
Bertrand Russell

Destiny is not a matter of change, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
William Jennings Bryan

Write drunk. Edit sober.
Peter De Vries

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
Douglas Adams

The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.
George Carlin

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One comment

  1. One of my favorites is by Dutch novelist Simon Vestdijk, who was a very prolific writer (and referred to by a colleague as “the man who writes faster than God can read”): “I know writers who take a long rest after finishing writing a book. I don’t understand that, it’s not like it wears you out: you can just sit down for it .”

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