Writing Quotes

18562 Writing quotes by 6643 unique authors

Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that… — Lord Chesterfield
Never throw up on an editor. — Unknown Author
There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot. — L. Sprague de Camp
Every novel should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. — Peter De Vries
Make everybody fall out of the plane first, and then explain who they were and why they were in the plane to begin with. — Ansen Dibell
What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority… — E L Doctorow
As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not!… — Fyodor Dostoevsky
To write good SF today...you must push further and harder, reach deeper into your own mind until you break through into the strange and terrible… — Gardner Dozois
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write… — Harlan Ellison
The virtue of books is to be readable. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing, not love, not greed, not passion or hatred, is stronger than a writer's need to change another writer's copy. — Unknown Author
There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can't screw it up. — Raymond E. Feist
To the composition of novels and romances, nothing is necessary but paper, pens, and ink, with the manual capacity of using them. — Henry Fielding
Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Observe, don't imitate. — John M. Ford
The historian records, but the novelist creates. — E. M. Forster
A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life. — E. M. Forster
Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages. — E. M. Forster
The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict. — James Frey
Style is less the man than the way a man takes himself. — Robert Frost
An artist's sensitivity to criticism is, at least in part, an effort to keep unimpaired the zest, or confidence, or arrogance, which he needs to… — Christopher Fry
If you haven't got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the… — William Campbell Gault
Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature. — Andre Gide
In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers - to apply them to the expression of my own… — Shirley Ann Grau
The writer's genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer's… — James Gunn

Who Wrote These Writing Quotes

6,643 authors contributed a total of 18,562 Writing Quotes, led by these top contributors: