The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Elmore Leonard2 quotes
Yeah, I try to leave out the parts that people skip. — Elmore Leonard · 1985I asked him one time what type of writing brought the most money and the agent says, "Ransom notes." — Elmore Leonard · 1990George Orwell2 quotes
Good prose is like a windowpane. — George Orwell · 1946The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. — George Orwell · 1946Gustave Flaubert2 quotes
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in. — Gustave Flaubert · 1851It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts. — Gustave Flaubert · 1851A.A. Milne1 quote
Eeyore was saying to himself, "This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it." — A.A. Milne · 1926Amy Tan1 quote
I've often fantasized I would get a lot of writing done if I were put in prison for a minor crime. Three to six months. — Amy Tan · 2013Blaise Pascal1 quote
When we see a natural style, we are quite surprised and delighted, for we expected to see an author and we find a man. — Blaise Pascal · 1662Ernest Hemingway1 quote
The first draft of anything is shit. — Ernest Hemingway · 1935F. Scott Fitzgerald1 quote
An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke. — F. Scott FitzgeraldFlannery O'Connor1 quote
When the grim reaper comes to get me, he'll have to give me a few extra hours to revise my last words. — Flannery O'Connor · 1959Francis Bacon1 quote
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. — Francis Bacon · 1625Henry David Thoreau1 quote
A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. — Henry David Thoreau · 1849Horace1 quote
You will have written exceptionally well if, by skillful arrangement of your words, you have made an ordinary one seem original. — Horace · 19 BCIsaac Babel1 quote
Your language becomes clear and strong, not when you can no longer add a sentence, but when you can no longer take away from it. — Isaac Babel · 1940Jhumpa Lahiri1 quote
Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do. — Jhumpa Lahiri · 2012John Adams1 quote
A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition. — John Adams · 1760Jonathan Swift1 quote
Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style. — Jonathan Swift · 1720Mark Twain1 quote
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is Left out of it. — Mark Twain · 1897Matthew Arnold1 quote
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style. — Matthew Arnold · 1903Maya Angelou1 quote
I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, "You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth." — Maya Angelou · 2013Miguel de Cervantes1 quote
The pen is the tongue of the soul. — Miguel de Cervantes · 1615Nathaniel Hawthorne1 quote
Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. — Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1848Philip Levine1 quote
I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary. — Philip Levine · 2001Ralph Waldo Emerson1 quote
A good writer seems to be writing about himself, (but never is,) but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself, & all things. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1867Ray Bradbury1 quote
I have several walls in several rooms of my house covered with the snowstorm of rejections, but they didn't realize what a strong person I was, I persevered and wrote a thousand more dreadful short stories, which were rejected in turn. — Ray Bradbury · 2002Raymond Chandler1 quote
When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. — Raymond Chandler · 1950Robert Frost1 quote
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Robert Frost · 1939Roger Ascham1 quote
He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as the wise men do; and so should every man understand him, and the judgement of the wise man allow him. — Roger Ascham · 1545Slavoj Zizek1 quote
Writing saved my life. — Slavoj Zizek · 2016Theodor Adorno1 quote
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. — Theodor Adorno · 1951Toni Morrison1 quote
I don't wait to be struck by lightning and don't need certain slants of light in order to write. — Toni Morrison · 1981