• Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.  — Joseph Pulitzer
• Easy reading is damn hard writing.  — Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite. – Edward Albee
• The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.  — Mark Twain
• Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence. — Ishmael Reed
• Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. – Hermann Hesse
• Words make love with one another. – Andre Breton
• The sovereign rule:  don’t say it, write it. — James Michener
• Only a mediocre writer is always at his best. – W. Somerset Maugham
• With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs. – James Thurber
• I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it. – Janet Flanner
• I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it. — William Carlos Williams
• There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together. – Josh Billings
• In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style. – Sydney Smith
• A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. – Thomas Mann
• The waste basket is the writer’s best friend. – Isaac Bashevis Singer

(ed. – This is a repost that originally appeared in the By George Journal in July 2009 – here.)