Robert Louis Stevenson Writing Quotations

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

It takes hard writing to make easy reading.

Do not write merely to be understood. Write so you cannot possibly be misunderstood.

When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.

All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went again to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.

If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

I hate to write, but I love to have written.

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it.

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see the sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani.

The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.

I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.

When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.

No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.