Writers
Favorite Selections from ToInspire.com

It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings. - Ernest Hemingway

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention. - Ernest Hemingway

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. - Percy Bysshe Shelley

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.  - David Hare

I am an artist… I am here to live out loud. - Emile Zola

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all. - Lord Byron

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. - John Cheever

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way. - Richard Harding Davis

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it. - William Faulkner

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood. - Peter Handke

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers. - Horace

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. - Samuel Johnson

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it. - Karl Marx

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill. - Edmund Morrison

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. - Flannery O'Connor

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. - George Orwell

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others. - Leo Rosten

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for. - Socrates

In six pages I can't even say hello. - James Michener

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write. - Elie Wiesel

Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water. - Robert Frost

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. - Carl Sagan

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. - Virginia Woolf