Write wit 2

Way back in December 2010 I wrote a blog posting of quotations about writers and writing Write wit. It seemed to go down well, so here are some more offerings of the same - a sequel, as it were.

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”

Ivan Turgenev

“I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.”
P G Wodehouse  

"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?"
Vita Sackville-West

Vita Sackville West

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
E L Doctorow 

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

"There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent."

J B Priestley

"Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does."
Groucho Marx 

"A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation for the editor."
Ring Lardner

"Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon."

William Zinsser

“One thing that literature would be greatly the better for

Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.”

Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash

“If you steal from one author it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s research.”

Wilson Mizner  

“Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”
Rod Serling 

“Television has raised writing to a new low.”

Samuel Goldwyn

"Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."

Frank Zappa

"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”
Robert Frost 

“Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.”
Mickey Spillane 

“I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.“
V S Naipaul 

"When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer."
Isaac Singer 

"People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy - and I keep it in a jar on my desk."
Stephen King

Stephen King

 “I'm a lousy writer; a helluva lot of people have got lousy taste.”
Grace Metalious 

 "I was thirty-seven when I went to work writing the column. I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security, and too tired for an affair."

Erma Bombeck

"If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves."
Don Marquis 

"There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets.The men who can read balance sheets cannot write."
Henry R Luce

"If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers."

Irvin S Cobb 

“Some day I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.”
Clarence Darrow  

“Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.”
J P Donleavy  

“Income tax returns: the most imaginative fiction written today.”
Herman Wouk  

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.”
H G Wells  

“Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.”
Franklin P Jones 

“Be kind and considerate with your criticism. It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.”
Malcolm Cowley

“Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes.”
G C Lichtenberg

“I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.”
Fred Allen 

“Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.”
Carl Sandburg  

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
Benjamin Franklin 

"The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business."
John Berryman  

“I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe

 "When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare."
James Thurber 

"There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them."
Elie Wiesel  

"It is all very well to be able to write books, but can you waggle your ears?"
J M Barrie

If you enjoyed these you might like to view my first Write wit post here. My third in the series is here: Write wit 3.

Write wit

For Christmas: some quotes and quips about writers and writing.

We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Anonymous

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Gene Fowler

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

Isaac Asimov

Write as if you are dying.

Annie Dillard

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Jules Renard

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

John Steinbeck

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

Stephen Leacock

A writer is someone for whom writing is much harder than it is for the others.

Ken Laws

I write when I am inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.

Peter de Vries

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute.  Or you might not write the paragraph at all.

Franklin P Adams

Writing is easy.  All you do is stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

Gene Fowler

There’s nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

W W ‘Red’ Smith

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.

Burton Rascoe

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Samuel Johnson

That writer does the most, who gives his reader the most knowledge, and takes from him the least time.

Charles Caleb Colton

Never use a big word where a diminutive one will suffice.

 Murphy says

The waste basket is the writer’s best friend.

Anonymous

Editors don’t reject writers;  they reject pieces of paper that have been typed on.

Isaac Asimov

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

Edna Ferber

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than read

Sinclair Lewis

 

Punctuation is the sound of your voice on paper.

Joseph Collignan

English spelling is weird...or is it wierd?

Irwin Hill

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

Anais Nin

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Logan Pearsall Smith

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Henry David Thoreau

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Samuel Johnson

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

E M Forster

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

William Thackeray

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by then I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O’Connor

It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs.

Stanislaw Ulam

We do not write in order to be understood;  we write in order to understand.

Robert Cecil Day-Lewis

Any proper writer ought to be able to write anything from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout.

Sir Kingsley Amis

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.  You must write every single day of your life, you must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.  You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.  I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.  I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.  May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories.

Ray Bradbury

POSTSCRIPT: See also my April 2012 post: Write wit 2 and my December 2012 post Write wit 3.