Writing Quotes

It's hell writing, but it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is just having written. -- Robert Hass


A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than for others. -- Thomas Mann

Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door. -- Emily Dickinson


I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. —Pablo Neruda, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, 14 November 1985

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. —Leonard Cohen


Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. - C.S. Lewis

Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea. - Robert Rauschenberg

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. - Robert Frost

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. - Ernest Hemingway

There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. - Leonard Cohen

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow
From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it. - Groucho Marx
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. - Paul Valery
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. - G.K. Chesterton

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. -- Groucho Marx