Quotes about Writing: W

The only difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is discipline. ~ Ayelet Waldman
All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Failure? I never encountered it. All I ever met were temporary setbacks. ~ Dottie Walters
If you can imagine it, You can achieve it. If you can dream it, You can become it. ~ William Arthur Ward
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life. ~ Robert Penn Warren
There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently talented writer can't get a good story out of it. ~ Lawrence Watt-Evans

Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise. ~ Evelyn Waugh
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity. ~ Evelyn Waugh
Pen names are masks that allow us to unmask ourselves. ~ C. Astrid Weber
I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to. ~ Fay Weldon
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ~ Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft. ~ H.G. Wells
I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there. ~ H.G. Wells
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge. ~ H.G. Wells

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page. ~ Eudora Welty
To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose. ~ Eudora Welty
There’s still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I’d gotten sunburned. ~ Eudora Welty
Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn’t know but the other character does know. ~ Eudora Welty
What we know about writing the novel is the novel. ~ Eudora Welty
What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left! ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jnr

One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked. ~ Morris L. West
It's an adrenaline surge rushing through your body. You have this spark of an idea that keeps threatening to burst into flames and you have to get the words out on paper to match this emotion or picture in your head. After this comes the work of cleaning up the mess that you made. ~ Janet West
Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential. ~ Jessamyn West
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking. ~ Jessamyn West
There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft. ~ Jessamyn West
Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject. ~ E. B. White
Be obscure clearly. ~E.B. White
The best writing is rewriting. ~ E. B. White

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all. ~ E. B. White
Writing is hard work and bad for the health. ~ E. B. White
In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech—that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud. ~ E.B. White
I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend - to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit. ~ E.B. White
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing. ~ E. B. White
There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rules by which the young writer may steer his course. He will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion. ~ E. B. White
English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education -- sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street. ~ E.B. White
Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. ~ Harold Whitman

You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. ~ Phyllis Whitney
Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it. ~ Benjamin Whorf
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
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. ~ Oscar Wilde
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing. ~ Oscar Wilde
He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone. ~ Oscar Wilde
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works. ~ Oscar Wilde
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. ~ Oscar Wilde

Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned. ~ Oscar Wilde
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. ~ Oscar Wilde
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. ~ Oscar Wilde
The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. ~ Oscar Wilde
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again. ~ Oscar Wilde
Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don’t have to draw you a picture; a hint will do." ~ George Will
I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing. ~ Tennessee Williams

I discovered that if I trusted my subconscious, or imagination, whatever you want to call it, and if I made the characters as real and honest as I could, then no matter how complex the pattern being woven, my subconscious would find ways to tie it together -- often doing things far more complicated and sophisticated than I could with brute conscious effort. I would have ideas for 'nodes', as I think of them -- story or character details that have lots of potential connections to other such nodes -- and even though I didn't quite understand, I would plunk them in. Two hundred pages later, everything would back-fit, and I'd say, "Ah, that's why I wrote that." ~ Tad Williams
One writes to find words’ meanings. ~ Joy Williams
The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost. ~ William Carlos Williams
Only write from your own passion, your own truth. That's the only thing you really know about, and anything else leads you away from the pulse. ~ Marianne Williamson
Writing came easy--it would only get hard when I got better at it. ~ Garry Willis
If the sex scene doesn't make you want to do it - whatever it is they're doing - it hasn't been written right. ~ Sloan Wilson
A writer’s job is sticking his neck out. ~ Sloan Wilson
A man who wants time to read and write must let the grass grow long. ~ Sloan Wilson

The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing. ~ Angus Wilson
All fiction is for me a kind of magic and trickery - a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't. ~ Angus Wilson
A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head. ~ Ethel Wilson
I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit. ~ P. G. Wodehouse (...after being asked about his writing technique)
Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed. ~ P. G. Wodehouse
I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn. ~ P. G. Wodehouse
I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write. ~ P. G. Wodehouse
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish. ~ Thomas Wolfe

By writing an outline you really are writing in a way, because you’re creating the structure of what you’re going to do. Once I really know what I’m going to write, I don’t find the actual writing takes all that long. ~ Tom Wolfe
You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing. ~ Gene Wolfe
One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them. ~ Tobias Wolff
Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language. ~ Hilma Wolitzer
Pay attention to the sound of words. ~ Dave Wolverton
Characterization is an accident that flows out of action and dialogue. ~ Jack Woodford
Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. ~ Virginia Woolf
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. ~ Virginia Woolf

If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you can't tell it about other people. ~ Virginia Woolf`
As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. ~ Virginia Woolf
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
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. ~ Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. ~ Virginia Woolf
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. ~ Virginia Woolf
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
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~ William Wordsworth
I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done. ~ Steven Wright
Wrestling with words gave me my moments of greatest meaning. ~ Richard Wright

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