Quote Me

Select one quotation from the list “Quotations about Writing”, that best describes how you write, why you write, or that offers you a new perception about writing.

Compose a short explanation that shows how the quote relates to your writing experiences.

Underneath that paragraph, Create your own quote about writing and or the writing process. Make s sure to give yourself credit by putting your name under you quote.

QUOTATIONS ABOUT WRITING

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

-Scott Adams

Never a day without a line.-Anonymous

I write for the same reason I breathe- because if I didn't, I would die.

-Isaac Asimov

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

-Ray Bradbury

The pen is mightier than the sword.-Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton

To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

-Truman Capote

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.

-Rachel Carson

There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature.

-Raymond Carver

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

-Willa Cather

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

-G. K. Chesterton

You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

-John Ciardi

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

-Tom Clancy

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.

-Robert Cormier

Don't play what's there, play what's not there. -Miles Davis

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

-Emily Dickinson

A writer is someone who is enormously taken by things anyone else would walk by.

-James Dickey

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader- not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

-E.L. Doctorow

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

-E.L. Doctorow

More than kisses, letters mingle souls.-John Donne

Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited.  Imagination encircles the world.

-Albert Einstein

Every so often the dog has to battle the bear just so he can call himself a dog again.

-William Faulkner

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

-Robert Frost

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

-Kahlil Gibran

If you tell me, it's an essay.  If you show me, it's a story.-Barbara Greene

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.-Ernest Hemingway

Writing is long periods of thinking and short periods of writing.-Ernest Hemingway

Write what makes you happy. -O. Henry

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

I do not choose the right word. I get rid of the wrong one.-A.E. Houseman

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

-John Irving

Show don't tell.-Henry James

The most valuable of talents is never using two words when one will do.

-Thomas Jefferson

Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.-Ben Jonson

A writer should know how much change a character has in his pockets.

-James Joyce

Writing is like cooking...if you spill something, you should make it look like part of the act.

-John Keeble

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

-Stephen Leacock

In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection.  But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word.  When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm.

-Fran Lebowitz

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

-Elmore Leonard

To produce a mighty work, you must choose a mighty theme.-Herman Melville

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.-James Michener

Keep listening. Keep your radar out. Take everything, because it is matter for your work. No detail is too small.

-Mary Tall Mountain

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

-George Orwell

Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

-John Osborne

I can't write five words but that I can change seven.-Dorothy Parker

We don't write what we know.  We write what we wonder about.-Richard Peck

I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?

-Katherine Patterson

A good title should be like a good metaphor.  It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.

-Walker Percy

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

-Anna Quindlen

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. -Muriel Rukeyser

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

-Carl Sandburg

In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want, and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball.

-Neil Simon

The wastebasket is the writer's best friend.-Isaac Singer

When I was a young boy they called me a liar.  Now that I'm all grown up, they call me a writer.

-Isaac Singer

I'm not alone when I'm writing-- the language itself, like a kind of trampoline, is there helping me.

-William Stafford

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never

do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's works is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

-John Steinbeck

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

-Henry David Thoreau

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.-Mark Twain

Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.

-Mark Twain

The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug.

-Mark Twain

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.-Paul Valery

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.

-E.B. White

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.-William Wordsworth

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.

-Jane Yolen