Quotes about Writing

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something to say and the power to say it -- only I don't know what it is, and I can't make use of the power. If there was some different way of writing...Or else something else to write about.

You'd be the first to complain if people didn't write,' Judd rapped out. 'Here's your egg. Boiled for three minutes exactly. I saw to it myself.' Taking his egg, 'On the contrary,' Fanning answered, 'I'd be the first to rejoice. If people write, it means they exist; and all I ask is to be able to pretend that the world doesn't exist.

If a man write little, he had need have a great memory."[12]

Knitting is very conducive to thought. It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

It has often been said there's so much to be read, you never can cram all those words in your head. So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads. That's why my belief is the briefer the brief is, the greater the sigh of the reader's relief is. And that's why your books have such power and strength. You publish with shorth! (Shorth is better than length.)

I realized that everything I had to do I could not do on my own, and so I was almost obliged to put myself in God's hands, to trust in Jesus who - while I wrote my book on him - I felt bound to by an old and more profound friendship.

I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachment' in the first sentence. But I know the word 'divine' makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

I want to write something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned. As usual, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I doubt if, after all, I'll ever write anything again worth putting in print.