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Quotes about writing

377 quotes from 206 people

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If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
Nathaniel Hawthorne1804–1864The Scarlet Letter (1850), The Custom-HouseIn context
There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured.
Robert A. Heinlein1907–1988The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), Chapter 3 (p. 33)
But I did not explain to you the other insidious aspect of writing. There is no way to stop. Writers go on writing long after it becomes financially unnecessary…because it hurts less to write than it does not to write.
Robert A. Heinlein1907–1988The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), Chapter 3 (p. 34)
Decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries — but it is a force stronger than crime.
Robert A. Heinlein1907–1988This I Believe: Our Noble, Essential Decency (1952)
- Journalism
- Virtue
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Nobel Prize Speech (1954)
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Preface to The Great Crusade (1940) by Gustav Regler
The writer’s job is not to judge, but to seek to understand.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 11
- Life & Death
Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Letter to Arthur Mizener (12 May 1950); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
Personal columnists … are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat — no matter who killed the meat for him.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961A Letter from Cuba (1934)
- Clever Jabs
- Journalism
A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 2
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Green Hills of Africa (1935), Part I, Ch. 1
- America