Jack London:

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Brenda Ueland

I learned... that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.

Robert Benchley:

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Frost:

Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.

Truman Capote:

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

Ray Bradbury:

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Samuel Johnson:

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Erica Jong:

When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.

Elie Wiesel:

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

Henry David Thoreau:

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Sharon O'Brien:

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.

Sholem Asch:

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

Brenda Ueland:

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

Jules Renard:

Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none.

Stephen Leacock:

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

F. Scott Fitzgerald:

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you've got something to say.

William Shakespeare:

If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me.

Edmund Morrison:

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Mark Twain:

Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.

Ernest Hemingway:

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Andre Gide:

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

Charles Caleb Colton:

Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.

Joseph Pulitzer:

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.

T. S. Eliot:

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

David Hare:

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

Mark Twain:

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug.

Raymond Chandler:

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

Samuel Johnson:

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Bulwer-Lytton:

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Richard Harding Davis:

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.

Lord Byron:

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Dan Quayle:

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

Peter F. Drucker:

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

Logan Pearsall Smith:

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Samuel Goldwyn:

What we want is a story that starts with an earthquake and builds to a climax.

Anne Sexton:

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

Samuel Lover:

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can sure it but the scratching of a pen.

Ivan Levison:

When your writing is filled with detail, it has a lot more impact.

Rudyard Kipling:

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Gaston Bachelard:

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Robert Frost:

All the fun is in how you say a thing.

Henry Ward Beecher:

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

John Osborne:

Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

Ben Franklin:

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Socrates:

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Flannery O'Connor:

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.

Henry David Thoreau:

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Peter De Vries:

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

William Faulkner:

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.