Writers on Writing

I like to collect quotes on different topics. Things that resonate with me for various reasons. Of course, a number of the quotes I save pertain to writing. I decided to share 10 of those today:

...I write to keep in contact with our ancestors and to spread truth to people. Sonia Sanchez

Never keep a poem waiting; it might be a really good one, and if you don’t get it down it’s lost. Ruth Stone

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. Robert Frost

As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle. Honore de Balzac

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

She was so much a writer that she didn’t need to put the words on a page—the world was her paper. Isabel Farhi about her grandmother Betty Friedan 

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is more than living, for it is being conscious of living." Anne Morrow Lindbergh

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself. Charles Dickens

If  you read a great poem aloud--for example, “To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley--and read it the way he set it up and punctuated it, what you are doing is breathing his inspired breath at the moment he wrote that poem. That breath was so powerful it still can be awakened in us over 150 years later. Natalie Goldberg

You need to know that your poetry muscles can get bigger. Nikky Finney

Do you have a favorite quote about writing?

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