#Writing Quotes

“Write till your ink be dry, and with your tearsMoist it again, and frame some feeling lineThat may discover such integrity.”

“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.”

“My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.”

“All life is an experiment. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment. I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom. Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”

“Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.”

“In good writing, words become one with things.”

“Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.”

“People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.”

“Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.”

“We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, andfind a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, "the italics are ours.”

“Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you you have omitted every word that he can spare.”

“Writing should be the settlement of dew on the leaf.”

“No book was ever written down by any but itself.”

“How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.”

“The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.”

“If you would learn to write, it is in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer's home. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.”

“Just as the sentence contains one idea in all its fullness, so the paragraph should embrace a distinct episode; and as sentences should follow one another in harmonious sequence, so paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.”

“Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale - who writes always to the unknown friend.”

“Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go, and is only right admirable when to all its beauty and speed a subserviency to the will, like that of walking, is added.”

“The sermon which I write inquisitive of truth is good a year after, but that which is written because a sermon must be writ is musty the next day.”

“This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues.”

“Writing a book is an adventure.”

“To secure your historical standing, be sure you are the first to write about it.”

“There is a good saying to the effect that when a new book appears one should read an old one. As as author I would not recommend too strict an adherence to this saying.”

“The short words are best, and the old words, when short, are the best of all.”

“He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.”

“I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.”

“Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.”

“Perfecting and selling your writing is a lifelong task. If you are a persistent writer, you can expect your abilities to improve with time. Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

“One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.”

“It is sheer laziness not compressing thought into a reasonable space.”

“When I sit down to write a book, I don't ask myself, "How many am I going to sell?"”

“A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.”

“Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.”

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

“Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.”

“The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.”

“Writing isn't something I do, writing is something that I am. I am writing - it's just an expression of me.”

“Get your passion on the paper. Detach from the outcome. Forget about whether it's going to get published.”

“It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

“Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.”

“Already by 1900 I could boast I had written as many books as Moses.”

“I have a sign on my door. I look at it every single day of the week. The sign says, "Attitude is everything, so pick a good one." You need a very strong internal knowing. For instance, when I sat down to write the book The Power of Intention, I had a very strong internal knowing that I call thinking from the end.”

“I don't write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.”

“Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to 'gamble' on an unknown.”

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”

“For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.”

“It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books.”

“Writing ... it begins as an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, then a master, and finally a tyrant.”

“Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”