"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
Elmore Leonard
"Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them."
John Ruskin
“It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things with immense, even startling power.”
Raymond Carver
"I think people become writers because they are compulsive wordsmiths."
Margaret Atwood
"[Reading] good writing is like swimming under water and holding your breath."
Scott Fitzgerald
"Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short."
Henry David Thoreau
"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives."
James Joyce
"It takes a heap of loafing to write a good book."
Gertrude Stein
"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."
Ezra Pound
"I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing."
William Faulkner
“Writing is something you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else I have ever done."
Ernest Hemingway
"It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous."
Robert Benchley
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
Cyril Connolly
"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."
TS Eliot
"Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live."
Lucy Ellman
"An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from."
Gene Fowler
"I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can."
Ernest Hemingway
"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."
A. J. Liebling
"It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer."
W. Somerset Maugham
"Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators."
Olin Miller
"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose."
P.G.Wodehouse
"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
Thomas Mann
"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy."
Dorothy Parker
"Be obscure clearly."
E.B. White
"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can't deal with this you needn't apply."
Will Self
"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
Samuel Clemens
"I am not a writer, but my poor efforts have made a great difference in my life."
Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux
"Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.”
Raymond Carver
"The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
Sylvia Plath
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed.”
Ernest Hemingway
"The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey."
William Faulkner
"When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."
Raymond Chandler
"Creative improvisation is the genesis of art."
Joseph Gilmore
"I love writing, and by 'writing', I mean, of course, staring at the wall for hours."
Joseph Gilmore
"Sometimes a writer must sacrifice plausibility for effect, and a reader must sometimes suspend disbelief."
Joseph Gilmore
"Stein shook the structure with grammatical catastrophes. McCarthy tore it apart and left it desolate. Hemingway wrote emotion without words. Faulkner was complex without feeling, and Joyce - well Joyce was eloquent in all things he wrote - but I want to strip it down to its arid bones, rip away the rancid fat and throw away the rot. I want to blow the dust from the dried carcass and find that what is underneath is all that's necessary. I want to discover as Kerouac did, of himself, that I am a writer, and this is writing. This is art. Call it flash fiction, micro fiction, whatever. I think I will call it, because it is unwasteful writing, frugal fiction."
Joseph Gilmore
OH Godot! LOL. The infinite waiter. Hello, man with meat eating dog friend. Dogs know the meal magic of marrow found in bones….What more is there to say?
Hello.
Hi there, I’ve subscribed to your blog as I’m intrested to see what you can fashion out of your desires to examine all the great writers, and all of the writers you mentioned are great influences for me. I love your writing quotes in the side bar – all highly important things to keep in mind, and too often forgotten!
Thank you. I love the header, MY OTHER BOOK IS A TOLSTOY. That’s wonderful.
Deep thinker huh? Gateway girl
If by deep thinker, you mean literary sage, then possibly…
Sir Joe, you have been nominated!
http://thecreativejuicer.com/2011/11/19/the-versatile-blogger-award/
