by Madysen Cheek

Created on: June 12, 2008

Although there are several quotes on writing, I find these to be among some of the best.

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

"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster." ~Isaac Asimov

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." ~Mark Twain

"Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies." ~Emme Woodhull-Bche

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." ~Anton Chekhov

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible." ~Vladimir Nabakov

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

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop." ~Vita Sackville-West

"If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." ~Toni Morrison

"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all." ~Richard Wright (American Hunger, 1977)

"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket." ~Charles Peguy

"So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it." ~Harold Acton (Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948)

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

"Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them." ~Blaise Pascal

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." ~Flannery O'Conner

"Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else." ~Gloria Steinem

"All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by...religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need." ~ Harvey Cox

"Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs." ~Jack Lynch

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