Writing Quotes of the Day

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
Stephen King

“The writer who cares more about words than about story (characters, action, setting, atmosphere) is unlikely to create a vivid and continuous dream; he gets in his own way too much; in his poetic drunkenness, he can't tell the cart—and its cargo—from the horse.”
John Gardner

"I have no theory of stories, just a theory for each story I write. A particular form is right for a given story and that's all. I don't like generalizations about literature - I think the general is the enemy of the particular and the particular is the friend of the writer."
Tobias Wolff

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
Elmore Leonard

“A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.”
Leo Tolstoy

“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.”
Samuel Johnson

“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.”
Joseph Pulitzer

"Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money."
Jules Renard

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind."
Vita Sackville-West

"An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward."
F. Scott Fitzgerald