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Quotes about writing

377 quotes from 206 people

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The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961A Letter from Cuba (1934)
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Letter (6 December 1924); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
- Humor
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 17, “Scott Fitzgerald”
- Genius
It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961On the loss of a suitcase containing work from his first two years as a writer, as quoted in With Hemingway (1984) by Arnold Samuelson
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life — and one is as good as the other.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (4 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.
O. Henry1862–1910Strictly Business (1910)
- Morality
I don’t think about rules when I’m writing – that’s the great thing about writing: it’s the one place in my life that I can do whatever I want.
Alice Hoffmanborn 1952Interview (2015)
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 time in which it is used.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.1841–1935Often credited to Oliver Wendell Holmes
And since, I never dare to write
As funny as I can.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.1809–1894“The Height of the Ridiculous”, Poems (1836)
- Humor
It may sound fantastic to link the term “realism” with Conan; but as a matter of fact⁠—his supernatural adventures aside⁠—he is the most realistic character I ever evolved.
Robert E. Howard1906–1936From a letter to Clark Ashton Smith (23 July 1935)
Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either.
John Irvingborn 1942Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1988)
- Clever Jabs
There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.
Washington Irving1783–1859The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)
I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.
Washington Irving1783–1859Tales of a Traveler, To the Reader (1824)
- Truth & Lies
It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
Andrew Jackson1767–1845
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James1843–1916Hawthorne (1879), Ch. I: The Early Years.
- History