Mark Twain Quotes

It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger.

I'm not writing for myself. I'm writing as an educator, I'm writing to stimulate others.

Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, 'I love you for what you do.'

The only reason I write at all is because I am going through, and growing through, something in my life I want to share with others through my personal experiences.

The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.

The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.

You write to be read. That is the bottom line.

I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?

I'm never going to be a Tom Clancy. And I wouldn't really want to be - not that I have anything against him, and I wish him continued success - because that's not why I'm writing novels. I'm doing it because I have to. I feel like I have to, anyway.

I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.

I think writing should be about change.

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

To write is to right things. A path will emerge.

You have two choices in life. You either die or do something with your time. You're going to be doing something - why not write?

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.

Why do I write? I guess that's been asked of every writer. I don't know. It isn't any massive compulsion.

One nice thing about putting the thing away for a couple of months before looking at it is that you start appreciate your own wit. Of course, this can be carried too far. But it's kind of cool when you crack up a piece of writing, and then realize you wrote it. I recommend this feeling.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don't have a pure motive (O it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) about writing.

In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear it's stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of the madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

In a way all writers are writing against death, because writing is an attempt to defy the passage of time, to refuse to let the past disappear and be forgotten, and to refuse to let the present become the past - to try to keep living another day, to try to talk your way into life, or seduce your way into it.

You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.

I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.