How to write

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements. - Samuel Johnson

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader. - Joseph Joubert

This is something that I cannot get over — that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character. - Karl Kraus

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. - Karl Kraus

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze. - D. H. Lawrence

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word. - Georg C. Lichtenberg

I think it’s bad to talk about one’s present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension. - Norman Mailer

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous. - W. Somerset Maugham

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it… I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent. - André Maurois

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk. - Henry Louis Mencken

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. - Henry Miller

It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer. - W. Somerset Maugham

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are. - W. Somerset Maugham