Quotes - Jonathan (The United States) Showing 1-30 of 107

#1

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

tags: deadlines, humor, humour, work, writing

32150 likes

#2

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

tags: good, writing

19423 likes

#3

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

tags: reading, writing

13093 likes

#4

“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

tags: humor, writing

9633 likes

#5

“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, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

tags: writing

7958 likes

#6

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

tags: dharma, simplicity, writing

8462 likes

#7

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

tags: writing

6446 likes

#8

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

tags: writing

4683 likes

#9

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

4611 likes

#10

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

3540 likes

#11

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

tags: creativity, invention, quip, wings, writing

4373 likes

#12

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

tags: college, semicolons, writing

3239 likes

#13

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf

tags: writing

3051 likes

#14

“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

3880 likes

#15

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

2610 likes

#16

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

tags: emphasis, exclamation-points, style, writing

1890 likes

#17

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
― John Steinbeck

1621 likes

#18

“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”
― Michael Cunningham

tags: life, on-fiction, writing

1196 likes

#19

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse

tags: writing

1776 likes

#20

“When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time. ”
― Lady Gaga

tags: art, craft, creativity, music, writing

1140 likes

#21

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert

tags: endings, happy-endings, writing

4801 likes

#22

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson

tags: writing

960 likes

#23

“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
― Emily Dickinson

tags: inspirational, writing

688 likes

#24

“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
― Jules Renard

tags: writing

879 likes

#25

“Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.”
― Steve Martin

tags: drinking, humor, writing

489 likes

#26

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
― Pablo Picasso

tags: art, creativity, motivational, picasso, rules, writing

2045 likes

#27

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.”
― Richard Bach

tags: editing, richard-bach, writing

496 likes

#28

“All I need is a sheet of paper
and something to write with, and then
I can turn the world upside down.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

tags: writing

1141 likes

#29

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it”
― Roald Dahl

tags: writing

792 likes

#30

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

tags: authors, childhood, humor, southern-authors, southern-writers, writing

767 likes

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