On Writing
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.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Easy writing makes hard reading.
Ernest Hemingway
A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to think.
Henry David Thoreau
Every paragraph should be so clear and unambiguous, that the dullest fellow in the world may not be able to mistake it, nor obliged to read it twice in order to understand it.
Lord Chesterfield
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
Rules may obviate faults, but can never confer beauties.
The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
A man may write at any time if he will set himself doggedly to it.
Next to the crime of writing contrary to what a man thinks is that of writing without thinking.
Samuel Johnson
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency . . . to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Lawrence Clark Powell
Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.
Aldous Huxley
In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.
Geoffrey Cottrell
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler
He who writes for fools finds an enormous audience.
The business of the novelist is not to chronicle great events but to make small ones interesting.
Schopenhauer
Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make more clear.
Joubert
Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it. Then you do it for a few friends. Finally you do it for money.
Molière
If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.
Don Marquis
How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
E. M. Forster
There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
H. L. Mencken
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Oscar Wilde