Quips from other Writers - Enjoy!

I am here to advise you that I have survived a laptop virus, idiotic computer techs and the overall helpless feeling one has when their computer is unavailable to them.

So, I thought instead of bitching about my computer problems of last week, I would instead offer some ditties from other writers about the art of writing. Enjoy!

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
~Ray Bradbury

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.
~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
~Anaïs Nin

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
~E.L. Doctorow

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
~Charles Peguy

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
~Sylvia Plath

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
~Elmore Leonard

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
~Logan Pearsall Smith, "All Trivia," Afterthoughts, 1931

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.
~Norbet Platt

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
~Vita Sackville-

WestWriting became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.
~Sharon O'Brien

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
~Mark Twain

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.
~James Michener

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
~Mark Twain

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.
~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.
~Dylan Thomas, letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
~William Wordsworth

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

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

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make. ~Truman Capote, McCall's, November 1967

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
~Joan Baez