10 Quotes About Writing

‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.’
– Maya Angelou

‘So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.’
– Dr. Seuss

‘Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.’
– Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

‘Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.’
– E. L. Doctorow

‘Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”’
– C.S. Lewis

‘You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.’
– William S. Burroughs

‘Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one neither resist nor understand.’
– George Orwell

‘Step into a scene and let it drip from your fingertips.’
– M.J. Bush

‘You have to resign yourself to wasting lots of trees before you write anything really good. That’s just how it is. It’s like learning an instrument. You’ve got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot. That’s just part of the learning process.’
– J.K. Rowling

‘This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy and that hard.’
– Neil Gaiman

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