Quotes about Writing

I mean, in some cases with libel laws, you know, they can write things about people who have no course of action, because they can't afford to take legal action against them.

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.

Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.

I don't know how much longer I'll be around. I'll probably be writing when the Lord says, 'Maya, Maya Angelou, it's time.'

Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called separable verbs. The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance.

Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect.

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print.

When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.