Quotes about writing
377 quotes from 206 people
Will Rogers1879–1935Nationally syndicated column number 42, Blames All Ills on Earthquake (1923)
F. Scott Fitzgerald1896–1940Notebook E (1945) edited by Edmund Wilson
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.1809–1894“The Height of the Ridiculous”, Poems (1836)
Oscar Wilde1854–1900The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost1874–1963Address at Milton Academy, Massachusetts (May 17, 1935)A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly.
Samuel Johnson1709–1784The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) (16 August 1773)Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling1865–1936Speech, quoted in The Times (February 15, 1923).It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James1843–1916Hawthorne (1879), Ch. I: The Early Years.The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters.
Lewis Carroll1832–1898The Selected Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (1989), p. 10American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Gore Vidal1925–2012Two Sisters: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1970)I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
Oscar Wilde1854–1900Written in a letter from Reading Prison to Lord Alfred Douglas (early 1897)They have an engine called the Press whereby the people are deceived.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963That Hideous Strength (1945), Ch. 13: They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their HeadsIn every man’s writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881Goethe (1828).Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf1882–1941A Room of One’s Own (1929), Ch. 1, p. 4