Writing Quotes of the Day

"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon."
E.L. Doctorow

"Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer--and if so, why?"
Bennett Cerf

"My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying."
Anton Chekhov

"It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit brilliantly."
C. J. Cherryh

"I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because when two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties."
Agatha Christie

"Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
Colette

"My task...is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see. That - and no more - and it is everything."
Joseph Conrad

"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

"The imagination is the spur of delights...all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by the means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?"
Marquis DeSade