Famous Quotes on Writing

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
       - Edward Albee

Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
       - Sir Francis Bacon

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world… The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way … people look at reality, then you can change it.
       - James Arthur Baldwin

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.
       - Sir James Matthew Barrie

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.
       - Truman Capote

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
      - Truman Capote

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

Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up on rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.
        - Meg Chittenden

Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death–fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous constant.
       - Edna Ferber

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
       - Gene Fowler

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
       - Lillian Hellman

The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.
       - Ernest Miller Hemingway

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword.
       - Edward Bulwer-Lytton