So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. – Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. – Anaïs Nin
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. – Ray Bradbury
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. – E.L. Doctorow
A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. – Charles Peguy
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. – Sylvia Plath
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. – Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977
I try to leave out the parts that people skip. – Elmore Leonard
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. – Logan Pearsall Smith, “All Trivia,” Afterthoughts, 1931
The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. – Norbet Platt
The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say. – Mark Twain
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. – William Wordsworth
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
Easy reading is damn hard writing. – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. – Terri Guillemets
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. – Orson Scott Card
A metaphor is like a simile. – Author Unknown
The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it. – Jules Renard, “Diary,” February 1895
Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. – Author Unknown
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. – Karl Kraus
