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Others have said...

"You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself." - Sam Levenson (1911 - 1980)

"Others Have Said On Writing..."

• "An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself." - Charles Dickens

• "A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket." - Charles Peguy

• "Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt..." - Colossians 4:6

• "The more I write, the more I learn" - Roy Peter Clark

• "I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them." - Anne Rice

• "Almost all words do have color 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

• "Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to" - William Somerset Maugham

• "Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

• "There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together." - Josh Billings

• "The most valuable of all talents is never using two words when one will do." - Thomas Jefferson

• "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

• "The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause." - Mark Twain

• "Use the right word and not its second cousin" - Mark Twain

• "Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few." - Pythagoras

• "Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap" - George Bernard Shaw

• "The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings." - Lewis Carroll

• "It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety." - Isaac Asimov

• "There is nothing so important as trifles, Watson" - Sherlock Holmes

• "Easy reading is damn hard writing." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

• "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed." - Albert Einstein

• "What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." - Samuel Johnson

• "To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs." - Jose Ortega y Gassett

• "Like apples of gold in settings of silver Is a word spoken in right circumstances." - Proverbs 25:11

• "My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way." - Ernest Hemingway

• "The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with." - William Faulkner

• "To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of a subject - of endless trying to dig out of the essential truth, the essential justice." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

• "I take the reporting side of writing more seriously than the writing side. I think it really is a lot of work to get things right, so I trained myself. I sort of take notes the way photographers take photos. You just sort of scattershot, record everything, because you never know what's going to prove invaluable..." - Jon Krakauer

• "What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful." - Edward Dahlberg

• "You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success-but only if you persist." - Isaac Asimov

• "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London

• "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." - Rudyard Kipling

• "Writing is thinking on paper." - William Zinsse

• "Writing and learning and thinking are the same process." - William Zinsser

• "I cannot live without books." - Thomas Jefferson

• "Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers." - T. S. Eliot

• "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

• "Writing is like cooking...if you spill something, you should make it look like part of the act." - John Keeble

• "I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters." - Frank Lloyd Wright

• "When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's works is all I can permit myself to contemplate." - John Steinbeck

• "Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." - William Strunk, Jr.

• "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." - Mark Twain

• "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx

• "It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous." - Robert Charles Benchley, Humorist (1889-1945)

• "Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs." - John Osborne

• "If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

• "The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

• "I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within." - Gustavo Flaubert

• "A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann

• "All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." - George Orwell

• "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." - Red Smith

• "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again." - Oscar Wilde

• "Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say." - Edgar A. Poe

• "There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write." - Terry Pratchett

• "Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet." - Anonymous

• "The pen is the tongue of the mind." - Miguel de Cervantes

• "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think." - Edwin Schlossberg

• "Never throw up on an editor." - Ellen Datlow

• "Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector." - Ernest Hemingway

• "It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little - or not at all in some cases - should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time - or the tools - to write. Simple as that." - Stephen King

• "One has to live a life that creates a writer." - Erno Paasilinna

• "Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen." - Maimonides

• "I keep six honest serving men
  They taught me all I knew;
  Their names are What and Why and When
  and How and Where and Who." - Rudyard Kipling

• "Books aren't written, they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it..." - Michael Crichton

• "The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do." - Thomas Jefferson

• "I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters." - James A. Michener

• "Write quickly and you will never write well. Write well, and you will soon write quickly." - Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, 65 A.D.

• "I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper." - Steve Martin

• "It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way." - Ernest Hemingway

• "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master." - Ernest Hemingway

• "You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country." - Robert Frost

• "They would not find me changed from him they knew - only more sure of all I thought was true." - Robert Frost

• "There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies." - Robert Frost

• "The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader." - Robert Frost

• "Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward." - Robert Frost

• "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." - Robert Frost

• "I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering." - Robert Frost

• "I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn." - Robert Frost

• "I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense." - Robert Frost

• "Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it." - Robert Frost

• "Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." - P. J. O'Rourke