The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
The waste basket is the writer's best friend.
The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.
It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
Those who write clearly have readers.
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.
Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.
Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
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