Memorable Quotes on Writing & Editing
Humorous Quotes
“All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
– Red Smith (1905-1982)
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
– Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.”
– H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”
– T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
“I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.”
– Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
“You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.”
– Robert Frost (1874-1963)
“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.”
– Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
“I never write 'metropolis' for seven cents when I can write 'city' and get paid the same.”
– Mark Twain (1835-1910)
“The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.”
– George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
“I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin, Librarian of Congress, historian (1914-2004) [On why he wrote at home from 6:30 to 8:30 a.m., Wall Street Journal, 12/31/1985]
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
– Elmore Leonard (b. 1925)
"I leave out the parts that people skip."
– Elmore Leonard (b. 1925)
“I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”
– A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)
“It's easier to teach a poet how to read a balance sheet than it is to teach an accountant how to write.”
– Henry R. Luce (1898-1967) [But Pen-for-Rent is there for anyone who needs writing or editing help.]
“The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.”
– John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
“A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist you are expected to know the difference.”
– United Press International Stylebook, cited by Bill Walsh in “The Elephants of Style”
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.”
– Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
“Only presidents, editors and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial we.”
– Mark Twain (1835-1910)
“Sentence structure is innate, but whining is acquired.”
– Woody Allen (b. 1935)
“You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.”
– Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)
“Save the gerund and screw the whale.”
– Tom Stoppard (b. 1937)
“Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.”
– Flann O'Brien (1911-1966)
“When ideas fail, words come in very handy.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
“Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.”
– Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
“The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.”
– Marty Feldman (1934-1982)
“From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.”
– Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
“Bad spellers of the world, untie!”
– Graffito
“The adjective is the enemy of the noun.”
– Michael Dirda (Senior Editor, Washington Post “Book World”)
“The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.”
– Clifton Fadiman (1902-1999)
“I am the King of Rome, and above grammar.”
– Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
“Caesar is not above the grammarians.”
– Tiberius, Roman Emperor (42 BC – 37 AD)
“The covers of this book are too far apart.”
– Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
“This book fills a much-needed gap.”
– Moses Hadas (1900-1966)
“From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
– Groucho Marx (1895-1977)
“Plato was a bore.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
“Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.”
– Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
“I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.”
– Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
“Hemingway was a jerk.”
– Harold Robbins (1916-1997)
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
– William Faulkner (1897-1962) on Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
– Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) on William Faulkner (1897-1962)
“That's not writing, it's typing.”
– Truman Capote (1924-1984) on Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
“Why don't you write books people can read?”
– Nora Joyce to her husband James (1882-1941)
Other Insightful Quotes
“Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.”
– William Zinsser (author of “On Writing Well”)
“Writing is a craft, not an art.”
– William Zinsser (author of “On Writing Well”)
“Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”
– William Zinsser (author of “On Writing Well”)
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
– Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) [Leonardo probably had larger problems than writing in mind when he said this, but it's still good advice for writers.]
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955) [Einstein no doubt had the laws of the universe in mind when he said this, but it's good advice for writing as well as cosmology. ]
“One should not aim at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.”
– Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, 1st century, AD)
“Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.”
– Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
“Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.”
– George Orwell (1903-1950)
“His Majesty the King requires that the Royal Chancellery in all written documents endeavor to write in clear, plain Swedish.”
– King Charles XII of Sweden (1682-1718)
“Make sure your message is clear, yet that you are faithful to its complexity.”
– Michael Dirda (Senior Editor, Washington Post “Book World”)
“The chief virtue that language can have is clarity.”
– Hippocrates (460-377 BC)
“Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.”
– William Zinsser (author of “On Writing Well”)
“Clarity trumps brevity.”
– Howard E. Daniel (b. 1944) [Copyright © Howard E. Daniel, 2004. May be used on condition that it is attributed to Howard E. Daniel, Pen-for-Rent.]
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
– George Orwell (1903-1950)
“Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.”
– William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
“There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”
– H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”
– Emile Zola (1840-1902)
“Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.”
– Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“Writing is thinking on paper.”
– William Zinsser (author of “On Writing Well”)
“Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.”
– William Zinsser (author of “On Writing Well”)
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
“Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.”
– Cicero (106-43 BC)
“Men of few words are the best men.”
– William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
“The letter I have written today is longer than usual because I lacked the time to make it shorter.”
– Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
– Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
“The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.”
– George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans, 1819-1880)
“Be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.”
– H.W. Fowler (1858-1933)
“The shorter and the plainer the better.”
– Beatrix Potter (1866-1943)
“Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words when short are best of all.”
– Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
“Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”
– C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
“Use the smallest word that does the job.”
– E.B. White (1899-1985)
“The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.”
– Robert Heinlein (1907-1988)
“I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.”
– Truman Capote (1924-1984)
“Be grateful for every word you can cut.”
– William Zinsser (author of “On Writing Well”)
New Quotes (added 9/2/07)
“Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.”
– Richard Curtis (b. 1956)
“There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either.”
– Robert Graves (1895-1985)
“Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”
– Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
“In the same way that a woman becomes a prostitute. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and finally I did it for money.”
– Ferenc Molnar (1878-1952 – when asked how he became a writer)
“There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.”
– Terry Pratchett (b. 1948)
“There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.”
– Fred Rodell (1907-1980)
“I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence…. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
“I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.”
– P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975 – when asked about his writing technique)
“Writing is easy. Just put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and start bleeding.”
– Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
“Grasp the subject, the words will follow.”
– Cato the Elder (234-149 BC)
“Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer – and if so, why?”
– Bennett Cerf (1898-1971)
“The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none.”
– Francois Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848)
“I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar.”
– Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881 – when correcting proofs of his last speech in Parliament)
“[The writer] knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall – Kilroy was here – that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.”
– William Faulkner (1897-1962)
“An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever after.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
“A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.”
– Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
“The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.”
– Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
“Writing is REwriting."
– Robert L. Kelley (Sandra's father, distinguished scholar of American cultural and intellectual history, 1925-1993)
“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
– Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
“Only a mediocre writer is always at his best.”
– W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”
– Herman Melville (1819-1891)
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
– Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)