Writing Quotes - Page 877

Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.

A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur.

If ever you've been down in the dumps, hear these iconic authors share with you more than their writing wisdom.

You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

That cat will write her autograph all over your leg if you let her.

I can't do no literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant.

There ain't nothing more to write about and I'm rotten glad of it, because if I'd know'd what trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn't a tackled it.

The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.

The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.

I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.

Men write many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains that where every man has a voice, brutal laws are impossible

Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down-- he finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done.

Writing is the easiest thing in the world.... Just try it sometime. I sit up with a pipe in my mouth and a board on my knees and I scribble away.

The editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind . writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we "modify" before we print.

To write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers pay within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.

When I want to read something nice, I sit down and write it myself.

We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print.

It is no use to keep private information which you can't show off.

Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new.

Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it.

In writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience.

I taught high school English for 24 years. I always teach my students to appreciate the beauty of language and to write poetically.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.