Writing Quotes of the Day

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones that you did do. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, dream, discover!”—Mark Twain

“Books aren't written; they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.”—Michael Crichton

“One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.”— Tobias Wolff

“Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head.”—Screenwriter Mike Rich in the movie Finding Forrester

“It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order.”—Ann Beattie

“Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.”—Catherine Drinker Bowen



“Every writer I know has trouble writing.”—Joseph Heller

“Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.”—Robert Frost

“What I learned . . . is that the writer must take infinite pains—if he writes only one great story in his life, that is better than writing a hundred bad ones—and that finally the pains the writer takes must be his own.”—John Gardner

“1. Find a subject you care about. 2. Do not ramble, though. 3.Keep it simple. 4.Have the guts to cut. 5. Sound like yourself. 6.Say what you mean to say. 7. Pity the readers.”— Kurt Vonnegut