works by:

Phillip Lopate

“Writers end up writing stories--or rather, stories' shadows--and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough”

—Joy Williams

“I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.”

—Anne Tyler

“Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig”

—Stephen Greenblatt

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.”

—John Edgar Wideman

“In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.”

—Denise Levertov

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

—E.L. Doctorow

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

—E.L. Doctorow

“Let's face it, writing is hell.”

—William Styron

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

—Thomas Mann

“Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.”

—Paul Rudnick

“Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.”

—Padget Powell

“Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.”

—Shelby Foote

“I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.”

—William Carlos Williams

“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.”

—Iris Murdoch

“The less conscious one is of being 'a writer,' the better the writing.”

—Pico Iyer

“Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”

—Pico Iyer

“Writing is my dharma.”

—Raja Rao

“Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.”

—Anthony Powell

“I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.”

—Michael Cunningham
The Writer's Almanac on Facebook


The Writer's Almanac on Twitter

Subscribe to our daily newsletter for poems, prose and literary history every morning
An interview with Faith Shearin at The Writer's Almanac Bookshelf
Current Faves - Learn more about poets featured frequently on the show
Good Poems American Places

A generous selection of poems from The Writers Almanac in which poets express their love of American scenes: odes to hardware stores, road poems, poems about big cities and the vast plains and the ocean shore, including chapters entitled "Good Work," "A Sort of Rapture," "2x2x2," "Out West," and "On the Avenue.
Purchase Good Poems American Places »