Quotes on Writing & Writers


Here, for fun, is an article on a wonderful and unexpected use of the semicolon, a punctuation mark I love (and don't consider remotely anachronistic or pretentious, notwithstanding what Mr. Vonnegut has to say about it below).

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
--Molière

I can't believe it! Reading and writing actually paid off!
--Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
--Kurt Vonnegut

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

--W. Somerset Maugham

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

--H.G. Wells

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

--George Orwell

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

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

--Jules Renard, French author (1864-1910)

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

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

--T.S. Eliot

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
--W. Somerset Maugham

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
--Leo Rosten

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

--Walter Bagehot, 19th century British journalist

I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.

--Beethoven (ok, this is about writing music, but same difference motivationally)

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

--Stephen King

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
--Thomas Jefferson

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
--Cyril Connolly, 20th century English intellectual, critic and novelist

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

--Daphne du Maurier

A classic is a classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

--Edith Wharton

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.

--Kingsley Amis