(Robert Frost Place, Franconia, New Hampshire)
General Quotes
- All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. -F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. -Anne Lamott
Starting to Write
- [Writing is] the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.-Mary Heaton Vorse
- The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.-Tom Stoppard
- I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that.-Pearl S. Buck
- Much of what we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.-Gail Godwin
- Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.-Barbara Kingsolver
Audience
- You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has its ends in its audience.-Flannery O’Connor
- I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.-John Cheever
Ideas/Content
- Writing is thinking.-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
- Content comes more easily if you have something to say.-Sholem Asch
- You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.-F. Scott Fitzgerald
- I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.-William Faulkner
Drafting
- Write your draft with your heart. Re-write with your head.-from the movie Finding Forrester
Revising, Editing, Proofreading
- I constantly rewrite—an incinerator is a writer’s best friend.-Thornton Wilder
- Proofread carefully to see if any words out.-Author Unknown
- I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.-James Michener
Sentences
- I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then turn it around.
Then I have lunch.-Philip Roth
- Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.-Henry David Thoreau
- Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.-W. Somerset Maugham
- A sentence should contain no more unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.-William Strunk, Jr.
- The rule which forbids ending a sentence with a preposition is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.-Winston Churchill
Diction
- The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.-Mark Twain
- I put the words down and push them a bit.-Evelyn Waugh
- Words set things in motion….Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges.-Toni Cade Bambara
- Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.-Ernest Hemingway
- Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.-Rudyard Kipling
Punctuation
- Cut out all the exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at yourself.-F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language.-Lynn Truss
- Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools you have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go.-Annie Dillard
Style
- The best style is the style you don’t notice.-W. Somerset Maugham