Quote Ten

Just a heads-up: it's deadline week again here at Casa PBW, so for the next seven days my online time will be limited and posting here likely light and/or sporadic. Once I turn in my book I'll get back on schedule, but in the meantime here are:

Ten Things About Writing from Famous Scribes

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. -- Scott Adams

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes. -- Dave Barry

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape. -- Ray Bradbury

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it -- Octavia Butler

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

I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes... -- Phillip Dusenberry

The desire to write grows with writing. -- Desiderius Erasmus

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer. -- Barbara Kingsolver

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators. -- Olin Miller

Well, my book is written--let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can't ever be said. And besides, they would require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell. -- Mark Twain

What's your favorite quotation about writing? Post it in comments.