Mark TwainSourced
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Source: Following the Equator, ch. 15 (1897)
Checked quotes about writing
11 quotes with a known source.
Franz KafkaSourced
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Source: Letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904)
William ShakespeareSourced
Brevity is the soul of wit.
Source: Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2 — Polonius, in a very long speech
Blaise PascalSourced
I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.
The line usually credited to Mark Twain.
Source: Provincial Letters, Letter 16 (1657)
Samuel JohnsonSourced
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
Source: Boswell, Life of Johnson, 5 April 1776
George EliotSourced
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
Source: Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)
Anton ChekhovSourced
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress.
Source: Letter to Alexei Suvorin (11 September 1888)
Anton ChekhovAttributed
If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.
Source: Recalled by Ilia Gurlyand (1904)
Virginia WoolfSourced
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Source: A Room of One's Own (1929)
Maya AngelouSourced
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
Percy Bysshe ShelleySourced
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Source: A Defence of Poetry (1821)
Famous, but not theirs
Quotes about writing that are usually credited to the wrong person.
Mark TwainNot theirs
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
Actually: Blaise Pascal, Provincial Letters, Letter 16 (1657).
EpictetusNot theirs
Do not write so that you can be understood, write so that you cannot be misunderstood.
Actually: The Roman rhetorician Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 8.2.24 — about speakers, not writers.
Anton ChekhovMisquoted
Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
The real words: A modern condensation of advice in an 1886 letter to his brother Alexander about describing a moonlit night.
Ernest HemingwayNot theirs
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Actually: Quote Investigator traces the idea to sportswriter Red Smith, not Hemingway.
Ernest HemingwayNot theirs
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Actually: The story of Hemingway writing this on a bet first appears decades after his death; versions of the ad circulated in newspapers from 1906.