Writing Quotes of the Day

“There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.”—Ernest Hemingway

“If he's capable of writing expressively, at least sometimes, and if his love for language is not so exclusive or obsessive as to rule out all other interests, one feels the young writer has a chance. The better the writer's feel for language and its limits, the better his odds become.”—John Gardner

“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”—Mark Twain

“If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.”—Stephen King

“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's works is all I can permit myself to contemplate.”—John Steinbeck

"When I was a young boy they called me a liar. Now that I'm all grown up, they call me a writer.”—Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending." —Longfellow

“Every writer must articulate from the specific. They must reach down where they stand, because there is nothing else from which to draw.”—Gloria Naylor

"Words are the clothes that thought wears..."—Samuel Butler

“There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.”—Robert Frost