A quick and dirty list of some of my favourite writing quotes for you to use in any article, post, diatribe, speech, dedication, mantra or bellow to the heavens. Hope you enjoy and feel free to add your own in the comments!
Ambition
1. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C.S. Lewis
The Aging Writer
2. With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
James Thurber
3. If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis
4. I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.
Jeffrey Bernard.
Research
5. Get the facts first. You can distort them later.
Mark Twain
Honing
6. The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Mark Twain
7. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. Ray Bradbury
8. Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller quotes
Deadlines
9. I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.
Douglas Adams
10. Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
Paul Theroux
Procrastination
11. For a moment, nothing happened.Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
Douglas Adams
12. The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.
Agatha Christie
13. Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance
Dan Greenburg
Getting It Right
14. A good novel tells us the truth about it’s hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
15. The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.
Richard Harding Davis
16. The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy
The Truth about Writing
17. A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
William Faulkner
18. Let’s face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
20. For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Ernest Hemingway
21. I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries
22. The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly quotes
Criticism
23. This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker
Getting Paid
24. The free-lance writer is the person who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Robert Benchley
25. The large print giveth, but the small print taketh away.
Tom Waits
Companions
26. A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It’s a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.
Barbara Holland
27. A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
P. L. Travers
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