“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss. You can’t do it alone.”
— John Cheever
“A writer begins a book. The reader finishes it.”
— Samuel Johnson
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. It’s as simple as that.”
— Stephen King
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
— Robert Frost
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
— Thomas Mann
“Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”
— Sylvia Plath
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
— Albert Camus
“I write to discover what I know.”
— Flannery O’Connor
“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”
— Elmore Leonard
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”
— William Faulkner
3 thoughts on “Some Words to Write By”
I love the John Cheever quote and wish more middle grade authors would consider this. Fun fact: when I was in high school, Cheever had an article in Parade Magazine, and I wrote to him. He wrote back! He died not long after that, and I always thought it was so kind of him to answer a letter from a young reader.
Words to live by! So many resonate, Stephen King’s and Robert Frost’s are just plain truth!
So glad to have found this site! I’m teaching a middle school writing club and my students are big fans of yours, with “The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle” being a class favorite.