Jokes, Quotes & Quips

This page will host an expanding collection of quotes, jokes, cartoons and other materials about writers and the process of writing; of course we'll put in as much about copywriting as we can find.

"It's easy to write. You just sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."
—Red Smith

"Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."
—Gene Fowler 1890-1960 (thanks to friend Tim Hurson from Toronto for this quote and several more on this page)

"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say."
— Sholem Asch

"I try to leave out the parts people skip."
— Elmore Leonard

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
— Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862

"How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words."
— Maurice Maeterlinck

"Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."
— Samuel Johnson

"When you catch an adjective, kill it."
— Mark Twain 1833-1910

"Only the hand that erases can write the true thing."
— Meister Eckhart

"Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken."
— C. S. Lewis

"I see but one rule: to be clear."
— Stendhal

"Art, it seems to me, should simplify . . . finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page."
— Willa Cather

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
— William Strunk Jr.

"We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves."
— John Locke"

"In good writing, words become one with things."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

". . . writing is largely a matter of catching things in mid-flight as they flash by, rather than assembling given components and fiddling about with them on paper until they look pretty."
— Tom Stoppard

"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over."
— Ernest Hemingway

"You lose it if you talk about it."
— Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961

"Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns."
— Victor Hugo

"Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found."
— Alexander Pope

"Part of becoming a writer is the desire to have everything mean something."
— Louise Erdrich

"Words are the small change of thought."
— Jules Renard

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. T.S.
— Eliot 1888-1965

"Half my life is an act of revision."
— John Irving

"If in the first chapter you say that a gun hung on the wall, in the second or third chapter it must without fail be discharged."
— Anton Chekhov

"I do not write as I want to: I write as I can."
— Somerset Maugham

"Take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself."
— Lewis Carroll

"Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use."
— Samuel Butler

"What is a writer but a schmuck with an Underwood?"
— Jack Warner