This document contains a collection of quotes about writing from various authors. It discusses the difficulty of writing for some, the benefits of being disorganized in finding discoveries, writing to understand one's own thoughts, all great writers being failures to some degree, the need to fictionalize reality to depict it truly, focusing writing on dangerous or controversial topics, the importance of emotion in both the writing and reading, removing passages thought to be too polished, corrected works being less correct, and the need to let go and give up control for a novel to be good or doing something worth chronicling if not writing something worthwhile.

1. in paradoxes, oxymorons, and pleonasms
Meditations
on Writing
David Wood
@prototypo

2. The Writer

3. “A writer is somebody for
whom writing is more difficult
than it is for other people.”
Thomas Mann

4. “One of the advantages of
being disorganized is that
one is always having
surprising discoveries.”
A.A. Milne

5. “I write to find out
what I think.”
Stephen King

6. “We are all failures -
at least, all the
best of us are.”
J.M. Barrie

7. Truth and Fiction

8. “If you want to be true to
life, start lying about it.”
John Fowles

9. “Our interest’s on the
dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief,
the tender murderer,
the superstitious atheist.”
Robert Browning

10. “No tears in the writer,
no tears in the reader.
No surprise in the writer,
no surprise in the reader.”
Robert Frost

11. Completion

12. “Read over your compositions,
and whenever you meet with a
passage which you think is
particularly fine, strike it out.”
Dr. Samuel Johnson

13. “The most corrected
copies are commonly the
least correct.”
Francis Bacon

14. “A good novel is possible
only after one has given
up and let go.”
Walter Percy

15. “Either write something
worth reading or do
something worth writing.”
Benjamin Franklin