Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
- Ben Franklin
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Author: A fool, who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting the generations to come.
- Montesquieu
I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of William Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.
- Bill Hirst
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
- Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
- Kingsley Amis
Biography lends to death a new terror.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
- Winston Churchill, Sir (1874-1965)
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
- Oliver Herford (1863-1935)
My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) Everybody drinks water.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
NOVEL, n. A short story padded.
- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) - The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.
- Anonymous English Professor, Ohio University
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
- A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)
"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say." -- Sholem Asch
"In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them." --
W. H. Auden
"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." -- E. L. Doctorow
"The pen is mightier than the sword." -- Bulwer-Lytton
"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing...I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain." -- Lord Byron
"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." -- Tom Clancy
"Writing is turning one's worst moments into money." -- J. P. Donleavy
"The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers." -- T. S. Eliot
"A poem is never finished, only abandoned." -- Paul Valery
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) , on Shakespeare
