Writing Quotes of the Day

“Writers don't have lifestyles. They sit in little rooms and write.”—Norman Mailer

“Words—so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”—Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”—Goethe

“Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.”—Harlan Ellison

“First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it....Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.”—Bernard Malamud

“Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.”—Alice Munro

“The duty and task of a writer are those of a translator.”—Marcel Proust

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”—Moliere

"The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation."—James Fenton

“We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.”—Anne Lamott