"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
“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.”
F Scott Fitzgerald
“Writers are desperate people, and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”
Charles Bukowski
“There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
Henry Miller
"Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are."
Mason Cooley
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only once."
George R R Martin
“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”
Cassandra Clare
“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”
Terry Pratchett
“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
G.K. Chesterton
“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”
P.G. Wodehouse
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
Fernando Pessoa
“If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.”
Charles Baudelaire
“My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.”
Gene Wolfe
“People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.”
Jonathan Ames
“All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”
Franz Kafka
“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”
Margaret Atwood
“Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from one generation to the next. Books save lives.”
Laurie Anderson
“No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.”
Edgar Rice Burroughs
“I like my coffee with cream and my literature with optimism.”
Abigail Reynolds
“In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”
C.S. Lewis
“If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.”
Anne Frank
“High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.”
Mark Twain
“What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”
Brent Weeks
"A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge."
George R R Martin
“After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.”
H.L. Mencken
"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
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