Quotations on Writing

Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until a drop of blood forms on your forehead.

~ Douglas Adams

It takes an awful long time to not write a book.

~ Douglas Adams

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

~ Franklin P. Adams

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn't hesitate to do so.

~ André Gide

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

A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written.

~ Isaac Asimov

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

~ Carl Sandburg

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in the mirror which waits always before or behind.

~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.

~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

Will the reader turn the page?

~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink.

~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.

~ Fran Lebowitz

- advice to writers

Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don't need you.

~ James Michener

- advice to writers

die duisterheid van 'n gedig
maak goeiste weet die donker lig

~ Boerneef

- "Rooibekkies innie mieliesaad", Op die flottina, 1967