Writers on Writing

Literature

I am dead against art’s being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author.
— Elizabeth Bowen

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can’t be much good.
— T. S. Eliot

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
— André Gide

In writing novels and plays the cardinal rule is to treat one’s characters as if they were chessmen, and not try to win the game by altering the rules — for example, by moving the knight as if he were a pawn.
— G. C. Lichtenberg

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.
— George Orwell

It is a great fault, in descriptive poetry, to describe everything.
— Alexander Pope

No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at
a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in
literature.
— Robert Louis Stevenson

The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything.
— J. M. Synge

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
— Virginia Woolf

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
— Virginia Woolf

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Paragraphs

The purpose of paragraphing is to give the reader a rest. The writer is saying . . . : Have you got that? If so, I’ll go to the next point.
— H. W. Fowler

The paragraph [is] a mini-essay; it is also a maxi-sentence.
— Donald Hall

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraph.
— James Thurber

Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas one long chunk of type can discourage the reader from even starting to read.
— William Zinsser

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Planning

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.
— Franklin P. Adams

Writing being what it is, print being what it is, and structures being what they are — you can’t put everything into it. You have to choose, and trying to figure out what to choose is the hardest part.
— Paula Gunn Allen

One of the problems we have as writers is we don’t take ourselves seriously while writing; being serious is setting aside a time and saying if it comes, good; if it doesn’t come, good, I’ll just sit here.
— Maya Angelou

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.
— Anonymous

The best time for planning a book is while doing the dishes.
— Agatha Christie

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
— Gene Fowler

. . . a thermos of tea, a quiet room, in the early morning hours.
— Carson McCullers

It is the lead that gives the writer control over his [or her] subject.
— Donald M. Murray

The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.
— Henry David Thoreau

I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.
— P. G. Wodehouse

By writing an outline you really are writing in a way, because you’re creating the structure of what you’re going to do. Once I really know what I’m going to write, I don’t find the actual writing takes all that long.
— Tom Wolfe

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Process

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
— Walter Bagehot

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
— Robert Benchley

If you’re going to touch or tempt the world with what you write you’d better make the ultimate effort, and in my prose writing I’ll crawl on my elbows to get it right.
— Hortense Calisher

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing a new way or to say a new thing an old way.
— Richard Harding Davis

Writing isn’t hard — no harder than ditch digging.
— Patrick Dennis

I love being a writer; what I can’t stand is the paperwork.
— Peter De Vries

Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.
— E. L. Doctorow

In good writing, words become one with things.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The language of the street is always strong.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The desire to write grows with writing.
— Erasmus

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
— William Faulkner

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

In order to be a great writer, a person must have a built-in, shock-proof crap detector.
— Ernest Hemingway

Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day’s work.
— Ernest Hemingway

The chief difference between good writing and better writing may be measured by the number of imperceptible hesitations the reader experiences as he [or she] goes along.
— James J. Kilpatrick

Writing is just work — there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes — it is still just work.
— Sinclair Lewis

The ancients wrote at a time when the great art of writing badly had not yet been invented. In those days to write at all meant to write well.
— G. C. Lichtenberg

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
— W. Somerset Maugham

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself [or herself] is almost sure to please others.
— Marianne Moore

Good writers have two things in common: They prefer being understood to being admired, and they do not write for the overcritical and too shrewd reader.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

I write what I would like to read.
— Kathleen Norris

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.
— Tim O’Brien

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.
— Sean O’Casey

Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.
— Pascal

I revel in the prospect of being able to torture a phrase once more.
— S. J. Perelman

Most people won’t realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
— Katherine Anne Porter

Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account.
— Marcel Proust

The illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
— Françoise Sagan

Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is), is but a different name for conversation.
— Laurence Sterne

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
— Henry David Thoreau

To hold a pen is to be at war.
— Voltaire

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
— Mary Heaton Vosse

A writer’s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.
— Ethel Wilson

A writer’s job is sticking his [or her] neck out.
— Sloan Wilson

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Punctuation

The composing room has an unlimited supply of periods available to terminate short, simple sentences.
— Turner Catledge, editor of the New York Times

Its overuse is [the dash’s] greatest danger, and the writer who can’t resist dashes may be suspected of uncoordinated thinking.
— Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans

The most important fact about a comma is that there are places where it must not be used.
— Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

The drive toward a lean punctuation is such that even if we still wrote the complex, periodic sentences of Johnson or of Macaulay, we should punctuate them much less heavily.
— Wilson Follett

Punctuation, whether we call it a science that contains touches of art or an art reared on underpinnings of science, is a graphic device for showing how sentences are constructed.
— Wilson Follett

The most frequent use of the dash is in pairs, to interrupt and set off a thought, long or short, which does not form an integral part of the sentence. In this capacity it serves somewhat the same purpose as the parentheses, though writers who like distinctions tend to think of the latter as slipping in a thought under the breath, perhaps for explanation, whereas the paired dashes throw in a fresh, not easily assimilable thought.
— Wilson Follett

I like to use as few commas as possible so that sentences will go down in one swallow without touching the sides.
— Pamela Frankau

Lately, I’ve been trying to be a lot more calm about apostrophes. I still mark a fair number of them in the margin and try to help students to learn how to write "it’s" for "it is" and how to recognize simple problems like the "dogs bone" and "Hashimotos brain." But I’m slowly learning how difficult such ideas are for some students in a world where apostrophes are not so important, where life goes on with or without punctuation.
— Irvin Hashimoto

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
— Ernest Hemingway

One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Punctuation marks are the road signs placed along the highways of our communication — to control speeds, provide directions, and prevent head-on collisions.
— Pico Iyer

[Lionell Trilling] returned [my] paper with a wounding reprimand: "Never, never begin an essay with a parenthesis in the first sentence." Ever since then, I’ve made a point of starting out with a parenthesis in the first sentence.
— Cynthia Ozick

Many writers profess great exactness of punctuation, who never yet made a point.
— George Dennison Prentice

The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into all sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn’t realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself.
— Lewis Thomas

It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.
— Lewis Thomas

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else’s small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!
— Lewis Thomas

Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don’t have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."
— George Will

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Reading

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men [and women] of past centuries.
— René Descartes

What is reading but silent conversation?
— Walter Savage Landor

As soon as I open [a book], I occupy the book, I stomp around in it. I underline passages, scribble in the margins, leave my mark. . . . I like to be able to hear myself responding to a book, answering it, agreeing and disagreeing in a manner I recognize as peculiarly my own.
— George Bernard Shaw

If I had sat down to read everything that had been written — I’m a slow reader — I would never have written anything.
— E. B. White

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