QUOTATIONS

Quotes for Writers on Writing

"Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet."

—Anonymous

"About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives."

—Margaret Atwood

"If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word."

—Margaret Atwood

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."

—Richard Bach

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

—Walter Bagehot

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

—Robert Benchley

"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right."

—Ray Bradbury

"The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love."

—Ray Bradbury

"It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer."

—Gerald Brenan

"Writing is a delicious agony."

—Gwendolyn Brooks

"Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

—William S. Burroughs

"We [writers] must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so."

—Albert Camus

"Good writing is rewriting."

—Truman Capote

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."

—Willa Cather

"The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate."

—Chateaubriand

"Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write."

—William Cobbett

"Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up..."