Writer Quotes that Inspire and Make Us Think

Language comes first. It’s not that language grows out of consciousness. If you haven’t got language, you can’t be conscious.

Words can be like x-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.

Verbing weirds language.

I have made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

You can make anything by writing.

And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before—and thus was the empire forged.

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

If my Valentine you won’t be, I’ll hang myself on your Christmas tree.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it with charges.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

I write to discover what I know.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Words are winds.

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.

Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers.

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Language has not the power to speak what love indites. The soul lies buried in the ink that writes.

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

War is what happens when language fails.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

The greatest part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.

I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor.

Fairy tales are more than true not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I’m saying.

Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Language is fossil poetry.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.

I think that we all do heroic things, but hero is not a noun; it’s a verb.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Language is the dress of thought.

To write is human to edit is divine.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.

Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

From now on ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.