How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Henry David Thoreau

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
Henry David Thoreau

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
Anais Nin

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
Edgar Allan Poe

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.
Ernest Hemingway

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Ernest Hemingway

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Ernest Hemingway

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.
Ernest Hemingway

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
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

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
Ernest Hemingway

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
Ernest Hemingway

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
Ernest Hemingway

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.
Abraham Maslow

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
John Adams

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.
John Adams

I must not write a word to you about politics, because you are a woman.
John Adams

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.
Samuel Goldwyn

Please write music like Wagner, only louder.
Samuel Goldwyn