10 Quotes on Writers and Their Writings

In honor of my last post, I figured I should continue the sardonic banter about writers in a series of quotes I recently found. Please enjoy the word candy and another cartoon! Happy Writing!

1.      The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. 
~Vladimir Nabakov

2.      Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. 
~Author Unknown

3.      I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. 
~English Professor, Ohio University

4.      Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers.  My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.  There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. 
~Flannery O'Connor

5.      Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. 
~Graycie Harmon

6.      When you are describing,
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don't state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.
~Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

7.      What no wife (or husband) of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when (s)he's staring out of the window. 
~Burton Rascoe

8.      Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
~William Safire, "Great Rules of Writing"

9.      The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
~Tom Clancy

10.  A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
~William Faulkner