Writing Quotes of the Day

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”—James Joyce

“The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.”—William Faulkner

“To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of a subject - of endless trying to dig out of the essential truth, the essential justice.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I take the reporting side of writing more seriously than the writing side. I think it really is a lot of work to get things right, so I trained myself. I sort of take notes the way photographers take photos. You just sort of scattershot, record everything, because you never know what's going to prove invaluable...”—Jon Krakauer

“What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.”—Edward Dahlberg

“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success—but only if you persist.”—Isaac Asimov

“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

“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.”—Richard Harding Davis

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”—Jack London

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”—Rudyard Kipling