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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..."

• "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