Quotes about Writing T

Almost all words do have colour and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone’s eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too. ~ Gladys Taber
Editors seek out the first novels with the seductiveness of Don Juans; the pleasure of discovery is one of the obvious reasons. ~ William Targ
If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky
The only way to learn to write is to write. ~ Peggy Teeters
Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within. ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson
No tale is so good ... but can be spoilt in the telling. ~ Terence, 160 BC

What's this business of being a writer. It's just putting one word after another. ~ Irving Thalberg
Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. ~ Paul Theroux
Although I usually think I know what I’m going to be writing about, what I’m going to say, most of the time it doesn’t happen that way at all. At some point I get misled down a garden path, I get surprised by an idea that I hadn’t anticipated getting, which is a little bit like being in a laboratory. ~ Lewis Thomas
Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else’s small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality! ~ Lewis Thomas
It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer. ~ Lewis Thomas

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. ~ Henry David Thoreau
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. ~ Henry David Thoreau
A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. ~ Henry David Thoreau
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things. ~ Henry David Thoreau
The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Don't get it right, just get it written. ~ James Thurber
The business of art is this--to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible. ~ Leo Tolstoy
Art is not a handicraft. It is the transmission of a feeling which the artist has experienced. ~ Leo Tolstoy

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen. ~ Leo Tolstoy
I can’t understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again. ~ Leo Tolstoy
A writer judging his own work is like deceived husband – he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs. ~ Robert Traver
Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. ~ Anthony Trollope
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. ~ Ivana Trump
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. ~ Barbara Tuchman
An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose. ~ Barbara Tuchman
I never started from ideas but always from character. ~ Ivan Turgenev

Write regularly, day in and day out, at whatever times of day you find that you write best. Don't wait till you feel that you are in the mood. Write, whether you are feeling inclined to write or not. ~ Arnold J. Toynbee
As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out. ~ Mark Twain
Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for. ~ Mark Twain
Don't say the old lady screamed- bring her on and let her scream. ~ Mark Twain
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. ~ Mark Twain
The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all. ~ Mark Twain
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible. ~ Mark Twain
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. ~ Mark Twain

Get your facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please. ~ Mark Twain
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use. ~ 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
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
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. ~ 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
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
Truth is stranger than Fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. ~ Mark Twain
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car. ~ Kenneth Tynan
I don’t type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand. ~ Anne Tyler
Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there’s nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing. ~ Anne Tyler