Quotes about writing...images from Flickr and also images from those collected over the years.

1. “Imagine a school with children that can read
or write,
but teachers who cannot,
and you have a metaphor of the Information
Age in which we live.”
-Peter Cochrane

2. "Ideas are the cheapest part of
the writing.
They are free.
The hard part is what you do
with ideas you've gathered.”
~ Jane Yolen, author of Owl Moon & Sleeping Ugly

3. “I write to correct life’s unfairness.”
~Verandah Porche

4. "Once I have the idea for a story.
I start collecting all kinds of helpful
information and storing it in three-ring
notebooks.
For example, I may see a picture of a man in
a magazine and say,
'That's exactly what the father in my book
looks like!”
~ Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, author of Shiloh

5. “Good writing is rewriting.”
-Truman Capote

6. "If you do all that work of figuring out exactly how
writing is done,
then it's available to you at anytime, and you can build
on it.
It's like the difference between shooting one hoop
and having it go in by accident and saying later,
'I shot a basket,'--and practicing so much you can do it
whenever you want.”
~ Mark Salzman,
author of Iron and Silk & The Laughing Sutra

7. “A writer is someone who can make a
riddle out of an answer.”
~Karl Kraus

8. "Eventually you won't be thinking about
style very much at all. Style will be a word
that other people use to describe words that
have come to you, and words you have spent
time seeking to make your characters live
their visible and invisible lives.”
~ John Casey,
author of Spartina & An American Romance

9. “The Six Golden Rules of
Writing: read, read, read, and
write, write write.”
-Ernest Gaines

10. “The key is to teach ourselves
to think, and the writing will take
care of itself.”
-Christopher Mobley

11. "The writing for me is hard work and
I always look forward to drawing the
pictures.”
~ Marc Brown,
author of the Arthur books

12. “By writing quickly we are not
brought to write well, but by
writing well we are brought to
write quickly.”
-Quintilian

13. “The writer is an explorer.
Every step is an advance into
new land.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

14. "...figurative language adds pizzazz.
It raises work above the plain, the
dull, the ordinary.”
~ Ellen Hunnicutt,
author of Suite for Calliope

15. “Metaphors have a way of holding
the most truth in the least space.”
~Orson Scott Card

16. "Published writers still struggle with
the writing process.”
~ Laurence Pringle,
author of Dinosaurs: Strange and Wonderful

17. “Writing is like a bird-watcher
watching for birds:
The stories are there: you just
have to train yourself to look for
them.”
~ Barbara Micheals, author of The Wizard's Daughter

18. “If one corrupts language,
language can also corrupt
thought.”
-George Orwell

19. "When I'm looking for an idea,
I'll do anything--
clean the closet,
mow the lawn,
work in the garden.”
~Kevin Henkes, author of Chrysanthemum

20. “The pen is the tongue of the
mind.”
-Miguel de Cervantes

21. "I think writer's block is simply the dread
that you are going to write something
horrible.
But, as a writer, you have to believe in
the words.”
~ Roy Blount, Jr.,
author of Crackers and One Fell Soup

22. “Memory believes
before knowing remembers.”
~William Faulkner

23. "Work extra hard on the beginning of your
story, so it snares readers instantly. And
know how you're going to end your story
before you start writing; without a sense of
direction, you can get lost in the middle.”
~ Joan Lowery Nixon,
The Kidnapping of Christina Lattimore &
The Other Side of Dark

24. “The only time I know that
something is true is the moment I
discover it in the act of writing.”
-Jean Malaquais

25. "I think what's really hard is making
sense and making what you write
clear and smooth-flowing.”
~ Roy Blount, Jr., author of
Crackers & One Fell Soup

26. “We write to taste life twice,
in the moment and in
retrospection.”
-Anais Nin

27. "Try drawing or painting a
scene you're working on. Often
this will help free up you
imagination.”
~ Kevin Henkes, author of Chrysanthemum

28. “Writing is the only thing that,
when I do it,
I don't feel I should be doing anything
else.”
~Gloria Steinem

29. "The golden rule of writing is to write
what you care about.
If you care about your topic,
you'll do your best writing,
and then you stand the best chance of
really touching a reader in some way.”
~ Jerry Spinelli,
author of Maniac Magee & Fourth Grade Rats

30. “Writing is thinking on paper.”
-William Zinsser

31. "I rewrite a great deal.
I'm always fiddling, always changing something.
I'll write a few words--then I'll change them.
I add. I subtract.
I work and fiddle and keep working and fiddling,
and I only stop at the deadline.”
~ Ellen Goodman,
Pulitzer Prize winning columnist & author of Turning Points

32. “Time to a writer is
like play dough in the
hands of a toddler.”
~Barry Lane

33. “I love writing.
I love the swirl and swing of
words as they tangle with human
emotions.”
~ James Michener

34. “If you think of the Internet as a
place to “look up stuff” you’re
missing the best part.”

35. “If there is a book you really want to
read but you can’t find it,
sit down and write it.”
~Toni Morrison

36. "I'm a rewriter. That's the part I like
best...once I have a pile of paper to
work with, it's like having the pieces of a
puzzle. I just have to put the pieces
together to make a picture.”
~ Judy Blume, author of Tales of a Fourth Grade
Nothing & Fudgemania

37. “When I write,
ideas wander
around in my mind
looking for
something to do.”
~S.E. Hinton

38. "Try not to become disappointed if
someone doesn't like a story you've
written.
Stick up for your ideas, but listen to
what other people say, too.
They might have good advice.”
~ Margaret Mahy,
author of Nonstop Nonsense & Fortunate Family Gang

39. “Students learn what they care
about, from people they care
about and who, they know, care
about them.”
~ Barbara Harrell Carson

40. "As a writer, you're obligated to draw
readers into your world, and if your writing
isn't interesting to them, you won't
succeed.”
~ Donald Perry,
author of Life Above the Jungle Floor

41. On writing….
“I try to leave out the parts
that people skip.”
~Elmore Leonard

42. "There must be something to think
about at the end.”
~ Chris Van Allsburg,
author of The Wretched Stone & The Wreck of the Zephyr

43. “Merely looking at a stranger’s
Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t
interesting,because it seems like
blather.
Follow it for a day, though, and it
begins to feel like a short story;
follow it for a month, and it’s a
novel.”
~ NY Times 9-7-09

44. "Write, write, & write some more.
Think of writing as a muscle that
needs lots of exercise.”
~ Jane Yolen,
author of Owl Moon & Sleeping Ugly

45. “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
~Nathaniel Hawthorne

46. “Inch by inch,
the words surprised me.”
~W. Kennedy

47. "The only way to do it is to do it: by
writing, writing, writing.”
~ Barbara Michaels,
author of Ammie, Come Home & The Wizard's Daughter

48. “To me the greatest pleasure of writing
is not what it’s about, but the inner
music the words make.”
~Truman Capote, 1967

49. "I enjoy writing and it is hard.
It’s hard for everyone to write well.
I have to rewrite over and over again so
that on average it takes me a year to
write a book.”
~ Avi,
author of The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle &
Nothing But the Truth

50. “Every writer I know has trouble
writing.”
~Joseph Heller

51. "Some of the best writing comes when you rehash.
It's in the retelling of stories that the improvement
comes.
The reflection comes in the polish.
What a person will see, what a person will feel,
comes in the polish.
When you finish polishing your writing, it forms the
image you're trying to create.”
~ Donald Perry,
free lance writer and author of Above the Jungle Floor

52. “A synonym is a
word you use when
you can’t spell the
other one.”
~Baltasar Gracian

53. "Revision is very important to me.
I have to revise, cut, shape.
Sometimes I throw the whole thing away
and start from scratch.”
~ William Kennedy, author of Ironweed & Very Old Bones

54. “I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an
excellent rewriter.”
~James Michener

55. “The first draft is a skeleton--
just bare bones.
It's like the very first rehearsal of a play,
where the director moves the actors around
mechanically to get a feel of the action.”
~ Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, author of Shiloh

56. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining;
show me the glint of light on broken
glass.”
~Anton Chekhov

57. "Push yourself to try new things--
it will make you a better writer.”
~ Deborah Nourse Lattimore,
author of The Dragon's Robe & The Winged Cat

58. “Putting pen to paper encourages
pause for thought making us think more
deeply even if our writing is thrown
away.”
~Norbet Platt

59. "Revision plays a very large role in
writing. Sometimes it seems to be all
revision.
And the longer I write,
the more I revise--
until it is completely right.”
~ Ellen Hunnicutt, author of Suite for Calliope

60. “The difference between the right
word and the almost right word is the
difference between lightning and a
lightning bug.”
~Mark Twain

61. “When something can be read without
effort, great effort has gone into its
writing.”
~Enrique Jardiel Poncela

62. “You write to communicate what’s
burning inside you.
You edit to let the fire show through
the smoke.”
~Author Unknown

63. "The concrete is better than the
abstract. The detail is better than the
commonplace. The sensual [through the
senses] is better than the intellectual.
The visual is better than the mental.”
~ Ellen Hunnicutt, author of Suite for Calliope

64. “You're never going to be a
writer unless you write.
You have to sit down & write.”
~ Jane Yolen,
author of Owl Moon & Sleeping Ugly