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Writing

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. – James Michener

Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. – Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. – John K. Hutchens, New York Herald Tribune, 1961 September 10th

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. – Ann Beattie, Picturing Will, 1989

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. – John Cheever

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. – Gene Fowler

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. – Francis Bacon

The expression “to write something down” suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it. – William Gass, “Habitations of the Word,” Kenyon Review, October 1984

Be obscure clearly. – E.B. White

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. – Samuel Butler

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man. РBlaise Pascal, Pens̩es, 1670

Every writer I know has trouble writing. – Joseph Heller

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. – Enrique Jardiel Poncela

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces. – Harold Ross

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. – Sholem Asch

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers

An author plants the alphabet — and harvests flowers, nourishment, and weeds. – Terri Guillemets

Is a stolen copyright a copywrong? – Anonymous

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words. – Norman Mailer, 1998