Q is for Quotes About Writing

I suppose I could have used "Q" to talk about using quotation marks, but I want to do something a little different. My best bud and I exchange writing quotes on a daily basis to inspire/encourage each other, so I thought I'd take today to share some of my favourites.

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

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.
~Lord Byron

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.
~ Anne McCaffrey

Being an author is being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.
~Terri Guillemets

He was such a bad writer, they revoked his poetic license.
~ Milton Berle

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little - or not at all in some cases - should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time - or the tools - to write. Simple as that.
~ Stephen King

Writing a book is a adventure. To begin with it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public.
~ Winston Churchill

Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words – the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.
~J. Michael Straczynski

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
~ Douglas Adams

I’m in favour of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.
~ Solomon Short

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
~ Harlan Ellison

Sometimes when I mean to pickup my pen I pickup my beer, and I write with my drunk and the ink is an intoxicant always, more so than any brew or fermented grape, my mind ferments momentarily and words are the raw hops but poetry flows out the bottle.
~Terri Guillemets

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

I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.
~ James Joyce

Ink surrounds me all the time
On my bed sheets, recorded in rhyme
Quills 'ever scribbling in my head
Sometimes damnit I forget what they said.
Ink has settled into my fingerprints
But to keep the words I fear to rinse...
~Terri Guillemets, Inkwells & Teapots