This is a growing list of my favorite writing quotes.
Check back often for new entries which I'll add to the bottom of the list. If you have a quote you'd like to share please email it to me.
Last update: 5/14/07
"The sound of a word is at least as important as the meaning." Jack Prelutsky
"Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing . . . the rest will follow." Jane Yolen
"Sure, it's simple, writing for kids . . .
Just as simple as bringing them up." Ursula K. LeGuin
"You write to be read. That is the bottom line." Jane Yolen
"You must write for children in the same way
as you do for adults, only better." Maxim Gorky
"Most new writers think it's easy to write for children, but it's not.
You have to get in a beginning, middle and end, tell a great story,
write well, not be condescending--all in a few pages."
Andrea Brown
"Three Rules for Literary Success: 1. Read a lot.
2. Write a lot. 3. Read a lot more, write a lot more."
Robert Silverberg
"Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed." Ray Bradbury
"It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all." Will Shetterly
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word
is the difference between lightning and lightening bug."
Mark Twain
"As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out." Mark Twain
"Don't say the old lady screamed--bring her on and let her scream." Mark Twain
"Don't tell me the moon is shining;
show me the glint of light on broken glass." Anton Chekhov
"The best children's book writers are not people who have kids, but people who write from the child within themselves."
Andrea Brown
"The most important advice I would suggest to beginning writers: Try to leave out the parts that readers skip."
Elmore Leonard
"Nouns are the bones that give a sentence body.
But verbs are the muscles that make it go." Mervin Block
"While writing, you’re weary,
Your eyes growing bleary.
Rejected, you’re teary,
But sales make you cheery;
So craft a good query,
And best of luck dearie!" Marvin Terban
"Good writing is clear thinking made visible." Bill Wheeler
"A manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure." Oliver Hereford
"A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit."
Richard Bach
"Good things come to those who wait...and wait,
and wait, and wait, and wait, and..."
Anonymous (An author waiting to hear from a publisher?)
"What is the ultimate insult? Getting a paper cut from a rejection letter!" Amy McQuade
"This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘not at this address.’ Just keep looking for the right address." Barbara Kingsolver
"A rejection slip is like a wad of used toilet paper:
it really stinks, but it shows you there’s more work to be done."
Lynn T. Fazenbaker
"Anyone can become a writer. The trick is staying a writer."
Harlan Ellison
"The most valuable of talents is never using two words when one will do." Thomas Jefferson
"The difference between fiction and reality?
Fiction has to make sense." Tom Clancy
"If you tell me, it's an essay. If you show me, it's a story."
Barbara Greene
"Cut out all those exclamation marks.
An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"You only learn to be a better writer by writing. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer." Doris Lessing
"Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it, and above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light." Joseph Pulitzer
"I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on." Leo Tolstoy
"Easy-to-read is hard to write." Pam Zollman
"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." Richard North Patterson
"Writing is seeing. It is paying attention." Kate DiCamillo
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read!" Groucho Marx
"It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit brilliantly." C. J. Cherryh
"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties." Bonnie Friedman
"I am convinced . . . that fine writing is, next to fine doing,
the top thing in the world." John Keats
"Adjectives, like adverbs, are lazy words, slowpokes, tranquilizers.
Watch out for them." Jack M. Bickham
"If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write.
Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow." Louis L’Amour
"If you wish to be a writer, write." Epictetus
"If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write."
Gail Sher
"The only thing that works with writing is that you care so passionately about it yourself, that you make someone else care passionately about it." Judy Blume
"This morning I took out a comma,
and this afternoon I put it back again." Oscar Wilde
"I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself
or your teachers and start thinking about readers." Avi
"Number one rule for fiction: Coincidence can be used to worsen a character's predicament, but never to solve his problems."
Vivian Vande Velde
"Getting published is a combination of determination and luck."
Mark Bowden
"What is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure." Samuel Johnson
"The ABC's of quality writing: Accuracy, Brevity & Clarity"
Source unknown
"A good writer needs to have that extra special something like humor or an extraordinary voice." Krista Marino
"Work at your craft, write daily, and follow your dreams
because dreams do come true." Christopher Paul Curtis
"You are not a hundred dollar bill. Not everyone is going to like you or your story. Do not take rejection personally."
Meg Cabot
"It's misleading to think of writers as special creatures, word sorcerers who possess some sort of magical knowledge hidden from everyone else. Writers are ordinary people who like to write. They feel the urge to write, and they scratch that itch every chance they get." Ralph Fletcher
"Don't think it, ink it." Mark Hansen
"Words are the soul's ambassadors, who go
Abroad upon her errands to and fro."
James Howell, writer (c. 1594-1666)
"Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words--the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered." J. Michael Straczynski
"Rejected pieces aren't failures; unwritten pieces are."
Greg Daugherty
"Great stories make the world more colorful, more vivid, more alive--they make the reader's world a bigger place while at the same time making the human circle closer and cozier." Linda Sue Park
"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." Stephen King
"Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life." Lawrence Kasdan
"Tape the word 'SPECIFIC' to the top of your computer.
Specific details make the story become alive." Dori Chaconas
"Children's books change lives. Stories pour into the hearts of children and help make them what they become." Jane Yolen
"I tend to basically exaggerate in life, and in writing, it's fine to exaggerate. I really enjoy overstating for the purpose of getting a laugh. For another thing, writing is easier than digging ditches. Well, actually that's an exaggeration. It isn't."
Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss)
"There are three rules for writing a novel.
Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
W. Somerset Maugham
"When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize."
Madeleine L'Engle
"What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers." Logan Pearsall Smith
"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write." William Makepeace Thackeray
"The first draft is a skeleton....just bare bones.
The rest of the story comes later with revising." Judy Blume
"If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape." Ray Bradbury
"I hear and I forget;
I see and I remember;
I write and I understand." Chinese Proverb
"A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack
and a pointed stick collecting stuff." Tony Hillerman
James Michener