Writing Quotes of the Day

“Find a subject you care about and which in your heart you feel others should care about. It is the genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”—Kurt Vonnegut

“A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”—Robert Frost

“And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages—all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.’”—Doris Lessing

“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”—Leonard Cohen

“Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”—Red Smith

“When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.”—Enrique Jardiel Poncela

“First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”—Robert Cecil Day-Lewis

“If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.”—Quentin Crisp

“If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset.”—Krishnamurti