Quotes about Writing

A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.

No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had

For Thérèse, poetry was not "art for amusement," because she did not write for her own satisfaction but out of duty, or at least with a concern to serve, to help, and to encourage.6

training in the writing of good English is indispensable to any learned man who expects to make his learning count for what it ought to count in the effect on his fellow men.

Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking.

Writing for the gallery is something that a writer must resist no matter who he is. You know the writers that are writing for their audience because they write the same book over and over again with the sort of cute things their readership likes. Serious writers write things that compel them, new challenges, new situations, and a new landscape that they have not been in before.

I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair.

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.