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There's nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.  ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.  ~Ray Bradbury

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.  ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.  ~Anaïs Nin

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.  ~E.L. Doctorow

A word is not the same with one writer as with another.  One tears it from his guts.  The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.  ~Charles Peguy

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.  The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.  ~Sylvia Plath

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.  ~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.  ~Elmore Leonard

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.  ~Toni Morrison

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "All Trivia," Afterthoughts, 1931

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.  ~Norbet Platt

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.  ~Vita Sackville-West

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning:  I wanted to know what I was going to say.  ~Sharon O'Brien

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.  ~Mark Twain
I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.  ~James Michener

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction.  By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.  ~Mark Twain

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed.  I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty:  at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.  ~Dylan Thomas, letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.  ~William Wordsworth

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.  ~Vladimir Nabakov

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.  ~Anton Chekhov

Easy reading is damn hard writing.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies.  ~Emme Woodhull-Bäche

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.  ~Orson Scott Card

A metaphor is like a simile.  ~Author Unknown

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.  ~Mark Twain

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air.  All I must do is find it, and copy it.  ~Jules Renard, "Diary," February 1895

Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.  ~Author Unknown

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.  ~Karl Kraus

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet.  So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing

prose.  ~Samuel McChord Crothers, "Every Man's Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else," The Dame School of Experience, 1920

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.  But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.  ~Samuel Lover, Handy Andy, 1842

I love writing.  I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.  ~James Michener

Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood.  I'd type a little faster.  ~Isaac Asimov

I love being a writer.  What I can't stand is the paperwork.  ~Peter De Vries

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne