Writers Say ...

"But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."
Lord Byron

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

"It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page." Joan Baez

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another." Sir James Matthew Barrie

"I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work."
Pearl S. Buck

"Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard."
Daphne du Maurier

"Women want love to be a novel, men a short story. "
Daphne du Maurier

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

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite." Edward Albee

"When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay." Brian Aldiss

"Women do not always have to write about women, or gay men about gay men. Indeed, something good and new might happen if they did not."
Kathryn Hughes

"Everyman's life is a fairy tale written by God's fingers." Hans Christian Anderson

"Talent is like a faucet; while it is open, you have to write. Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance." Jean Anouilh

"From my close observation of writers...they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review." Isaac Asimov
"It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything."
Virginia Woolf

"Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man." Sir Francis Bacon

"When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
Virginia Woolf

"You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way ... people look at reality, then you can change it." James Arthur Baldwin

"Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood." Georges Bataille

"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there." Thomas Berger

"Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one has not time to write down." (Louis) Hector Berlioz

"If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves."
Lillian Hellman


And here are a few suggestions from the Maestro ... the holy words for us, copywriters!


"There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself."
Mark Twain

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
Mark Twain

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
Mark Twain