Quotes for Writers - Page 2

• If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I’d type a little faster.
  Isaac Asimov

• Practice, practice, practice writing. Writing is a craft that requires both talent and acquired skills. You learn by doing, by making mistakes and then seeing where you went wrong.
  Jeffrey A. Carver

• Write from the soul, not from some notion what you think the marketplace wants. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.
  Jeffrey A. Carver

• The pen is the tongue of the mind.
  Miguel de Cervantes

• Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
  Winston Churchill

• If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
  John Dos Passos

• Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
  Annie Dillard

• In good writing, words become one with things.
  Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Writers aren't exactly people.... they're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
  F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.
  -Dylan Thomas, letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938

• The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
  -Vladimir Nabakov