Quotes about Writing

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see—every scrap

I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view.

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

If a writer is good at what he does, it's not easy to do a good job every day... To invent something new is almost an impossible task.

I think that's a part of what motivates me in my teaching and writing. Once the Gospel feels mainstream and becomes a nicely organized, orchestrated belief system, frankly, I don't think there is even an attraction to the human spirit.

The trick to writing an aphorism is to place a period at the point where you're inclined to say, "in other words...."

While the others chatted over their parcels Jean wrote her letter, and Jean could write delightful letters. She had a decided talent in that respect, and her correspondents all declared her letters to be things of beauty and joy forever.

On Monday I received a letter from Golden Days, a Philadelphia juvenile, accepting a short story I had sent there and enclosing a cheque for five dollars. It was the first money my pen had ever earned; I did not squander it in riotous living, neither did I invest it in necessary boots and gloves. I went up town and bought five volumes of poetry with it -- Tennyson, Byron, Milton, Longfellow, Whittier. I wanted something I could keep for ever in memory of having arrived.

Prose, rightly written and read, is sometimes as beautiful as poetry.

One of the reviews says the book radiates happiness and optimism. When I think of the conditions of worry and gloom and care under which it was written I wonder at this. Thank God, I can keep the shadows of my life out of my work. I would not wish to darken any other life - I want instead to be a messenger of optimism and sunshine.

She understood that she must not write merely to win fame for herself or even for the higher motive of pure pleasure in her work. She must aim, however humbly, to help her readers to higher planes of thought and endeavor. Then and only then would it be worth while.

1906 Anne of Green Gables is rejected by four publishers. Montgomery puts the manuscript away in a hatbox.