Of all the arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
-John Sheffield

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
-Alexander Pope

In order to write about life,
first you must live it.
-Ernest Hemingway

The process of writing,
any form of creativity,
is a power intensifying life.
-Rita Mae Brown

A writer falls in love with an idea
and gets carried away.
-Doris Lessing

When a writer talks about his work,
he's talking about a love affair.
-Alfred Kazin

Superlative writing
is love lavished on the word.
-William Gass

Fill your paper
with the breathings of your heart.
-William Wordsworth

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.
-Irvine Welsh

When I write after dark
the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
-Cyril Connolly

Always be a poet,
even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire

Take a pen in your uncertain fingers
Trust and be assured
That the whole world is a sky - blue butterfly
And your words are the net to capture it.
-Muhammed al-Guzzi

Writing is my form
of celebration and prayer.
-Diane Ackerman

Writing, real writing,
should leave a small sweet bruise
somewhere on the writer...and on the reader.
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The writer's responsibility is to increase,
develop our senses, expand our vision,
heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.
-Anais Nin

I enjoy the freedom
of the blank page.
-Irvine Welsh

No it is not easy to write.
It is as hard as breaking rocks.
Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.
-Clarice Lispector

A word is not the same with one writer as with another.
One tears it from his guts.
The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
 -Charles Peguy

Writing comes more easily
if you have something to say.
-Sholem Asch

Find your quiet center of life
and write from that to the world.
-Sarah Oren Jewett

I write with experiences in mind,
but I don't write about them, I write out of them.
-John Ashbery

The secret of being a writer is that you have to write.
It's not enough to think about writing
or to study literature or plan a future life as an author.
You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
-Augusten Burroughs

I have a notebook with me at all times,
and I begin scribbling a few words.
When things are going well,
the walk does not get anywhere;
I finally just stop and write.
-Mary Oliver

There are significant moments
in everyone's day that can make literature.
That what's you ought to write about.
-Raymond Carver

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit
of writing down one's thoughts.
It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
-Isabel Colegate

Writing is a fine thing,
because it combines the two pleasures
of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
-Cesare Pavese

Writing is a way of talking
without being interrupted.
-Jules Renard

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
-Gwendolyn Brooks

All writers belong to the class of non-orators.
-Thomas Mann

The pen is the tongue of the mind.
-Miguel de Cervantes

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence
and no matter what you are doing,
driving a car or walking or doing housework -
you can still be writing, because you have that space.
-Joyce Carol Oates

The greater part of a writer's time
is spent in reading in order to write.
A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
-Samuel Johnson

Read like a butterfly.
Write like a bee.
-Philip Pullman

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is:
tell the truth of his own time.
-Leslie Fiedler

The skill of writing
is to create a context in which other people can think.
-Edwin Schlossberg

I want to write books
that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
-John Updike

The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument
that makes it possible for the reader to discern
what, without this book,
he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
-Marcel Proust

Write what should not be forgotten.
-Isabel Allende

To produce a mighty book,
you must choose a mighty theme.
No great and enduring volume
can ever be written on a flea,
thought many there be who have tried it.
-Herman Melville

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes
that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece
and that no other task is of any consequence.
-Cyril Connolly

Write whatever you like!
-Seamus Heaney

You're given the form,
but you have to write the sonnet yourself.
What you say is completely up to you.
-Madeleine L'Engle

A writer should write what he has to say
and not speak it.
-Ernest Hemingway

If you talk about it,
you probably won't write it.
-Irving Wallace

Write what will stop your breath
if you don’t write.
-Grace Paley

The first job of a writer is to be honest.
-Irvine Welsh

All you have to do is write one true sentence.
Write the truest sentence you know.
-Ernest Hemingway

Every word born of inner necessity,
writing must never be anything else.
-Etty Hillesum

All writers can do is keep trying to say
what is deepest in their hearts.
-Lloyd Alexander

It is a great thing to write,
to no longer be yourself,
but to move in an entire universe of your own creation.
-Gustave Flaubert

When you're writing,
it's as if you're within
a kind of closed world.
-Michael Ondaatji

The material dictates
how it should be written.
-William Faulkner

My aim is to put down on paper
what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
-Ernest Hemingway

I want every word I write to be born, truly born,
none to be artificial, every one to be essential.
-Etty Hillesum

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient.
That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
-Ezra Pound

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.
That is the goal.
-James Baldwin

May I write words more naked than flesh.
-Sappho

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez

What I like in a good author isn't what he says,
but what he whispers.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

The true writer has nothing to say.
What counts is the way he says it.
-Alain Robbe-Grillet

The role of a writer is not to say all we can say,
but what we are unable to say.
-Anais Nin

What writing does is to reveal.
-Rita Dove

A good writer reveals the truth
even when he or she does not wish to.
-Tom Bissell

Writing is both mask and unveiling.
-E. B. White

All writers have concealed
more than they revealed.
-Anais Nin

Hard writing makes easy reading.
-Wallace Stegner

Writers are not mere copyists of language;
they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters.
They spend hours getting the timing right
so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.
-Louis Menand

I do not choose the right word,
I get rid of the wrong one.
-A. E. Housman

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
-Bernard Malamud

A seed grows in writing
as in nature.
-Carson McCullers

When you use words,
you're able to keep your mind alive.
Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.
-Gao Xingjian

For me,
writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
-Don DeLillo

I have never written a book
that was not born out of a question
I needed to answer for myself.
-May Sarton

It's why you create characters:
so you can argue with yourself.
-Michael Ondaatje

It doubles your perception,
to write from the point of view of someone you are not.
-Michael Ondaatji

It's amazing what you find out about yourself
when you write in the first person
about someone very different from you.
-Doris Lessing

But that is the satisfaction of writing -
one can impersonate so many people.
-Katherine Mansfield

Writing about people
helps us to understand them,
and understanding them helps us
to accept them as part of ourselves.
-Alice Walker

My writing is full of lives I might have led.
-Joyce Carol  Oates

Why do writers write?
Because it isn't there.
-Thomas Berger

I wrote my first novel
because I wanted to read it.
-Toni Morrison

If there's a book you really want to read,
but it hasn't been written yet,
then you must write it.
-Toni Morrison

The need to write
comes from the need to make sense of one's life
and discover one's usefulness.
-John Cheever

Writing is making sense of life.
You work your whole life
and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
-Nadine Gordimer

There are three reasons for becoming a writer:
the first is that you need the money;
the second that you have something to say
that you think the world should know;
the third is that you can't think what to do
with the long winter evenings.
-Quentin Crisp

The only book that is worth writing
is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write.
-Helene Cixous

You have to write the book that wants to be written.
And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups,
then you write it for children.
-Madeleine L'Engle

With each book I write,
I become more and more convinced
that the books have a life of their own,
quite apart from me.
-Madeleine L'Engle

A book comes to me and says, "Write me."
My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability,
which is never good enough,
but all I can do is listen to it,
do what it tells me and collaborate.
-Madeleine L'Engle

Writing is the only thing,
that when I do it,
I don't feel like I should be doing something else.
-Gloria Steinem

It is the only life I care about -
to write, to go out occasionally,
and lose myself looking and hearing
and then to come back and write again.
At any rate that's the life I've chosen.
-Katherine Mansfield

A writer never takes a vacation.
For a writer life consists of either writing
or thinking about writing.
-Eugène Ionesco

A day in which I don't write
leaves a taste of ashes.
-Simone de Beauvoir

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

I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still.
-Sylvia Plath

Find out the reason that commands you to write;
see whether it has spread its roots
to the very depth of your heart;
confess to yourself you would have to die
if you were forbidden to write.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

My bursting heart
must find vent in my pen.
-Abigail Adams

Writing is a delicious agony.
-Gwendolyn Brooks

I write in order to attain that feeling
of tension relieved and function achieved
which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
-H. L. Mencken

When you write things down,
sometimes they take you places you hadn't planned.
-Melanie Benjamin

Writing is nothing more
than a guided dream.
-Jorge Luis Borges

Listen to the voices.
-William Faulkner

When you start writing the magic comes
when the characters seem to take on a life of their own
and write the words themselves.
-Alice Hoffman

It's true that it's a solitary occupation,
but you would be surprised at how much companionship
a group of imaginary characters can offer
once you get to know them.
-Anne Tyler

The unconscious creates,
the ego edits.
-Stanley Kunitz

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others
what is burning inside you.
And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
-Arthur Polotnik

Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth,
to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.
-Helene Cixous

This is what writing is:
I one language, I another language,
and between the two, the line that makes them vibrate;
writing forms a passageway between two shores.
-Helene Cixous

The original writer is not he who does not imitate others,
but he who can be imitated by none.
-Francois Rene Chateaubriand

I am not an intellectual, I write with my body.
And what I write is a moist fog.
-Clarice Lispector

I write emotional algebra.
-Anais Nin

Often when I write
I am trying make words do the work of line and color.
I have the painter's sensitivity to light.
much...of my writing is verbal painting.
-Elizabeth Bowen

To write is to descend,
to excavate,
to go underground.
-Anais Nin

Journal writing
is a voyage to the interior.
-Christina Baldwin

To keep a diary is to attempt a difficult literary form.
Its effectiveness is likely to derive from
a special blend of honesty and appetite for life
that gives the power to record everyday happenings
while magically freeing them from banality and triviality.
-William Plomer

In putting down personal thoughts, feelings, sensations, intuitions,
I hope to discriminate,
to see and feel objectively the daily story of my life.
-Helen M. Luke

It would be curious to discover
who it is to whom one writes a diary.
Possibly to some mysterious personification
of one's own personality.
-Beatrice Webb

In a diary
I can keep track of the two faces of reality.
-Anais Nin

A writer's duty is to register
what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
-Zadie Smith

Surely the whole point of writing your own life story
is to be as honest as you possibly can,
revealing everything about yourself that is most private
and probably most interesting for that very reason.
-Judith Krantz

Write books only if you are going to say in them
the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
-Emile Cioran

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone
the things it is not possible to say to someone.
-Rebecca Solnit

It is rather our interior self I'm concerned with,
and therefore with the language
which springs out of the most retiring and inmost parts of us.
-William Gass

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience.
Everything depends on how relentlessly
one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter,
it can possibly give.
-James Baldwin

The books I'm writing
are houses that I build for myself.
-Etel Adnan

I've never known a writer who didn't feel ill at ease in the world...
We all feel unhoused in some sense.
That's part of why we write.
We feel we don't fit in, that this world is not our world,
that though we may move in it, we're not of it...
You don't need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.
-Andrea Barrett

One writes to make a home for oneself,
on paper, in time, and in other people's minds.
-Alfred Kazin

I believe one writes
because one has to create a world in which one can live.
I could not live in any of the world offered to me...
I had to create a world of my own,
like a climate, a country, an atmosphere
in which I could breathe, reign and recreate myself
when destroyed by living.
That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.
-Anais Nin

We write to heighten our own awareness of life.
We write to lure and enchant and console others.
We write to serenade our lovers.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal,
and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal.
We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.
We write to teach ourselves to speak with others,
to record the journey into the labyrinth.
We write to expand our world when we feel strangled,
or constricted, or lonely.
-Anais Nin

Write something to suit yourself
and many people will like it;
write something to suit everybody
and scarcely anyone will care for it.
-Jesse Stuart

A real writer only wants his book to be read
by those people who want to read it,
and if there are 100 of them,
it is enough to keep his work alive
and sustain his productivity.
-Anais Nin

I am not a writer except when I write.
-Juan Carlos Onetti

If I've done my work well,
I vanish completely from the scene.
I believe it is invasive in the work
when you know too much about the writer.
-Mary Oliver

Who, you ask, is this fellow? -
What matter names?
He is only a scribbler who is content.
-James Branch Cabell

I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading,
as I had in the writing.
-Francis Quarles