Programming and Writing are similar in a way - programming is instructing computers while writing is instructing readers. Programming and writing are easy but good programming and good writing are difficult. Good writing is difficult on a number of levels but one important reason is that writing is usually about human behavior (hold your horses - no one is stopping you from writing novels about cats or dogs or ...) and human behavior is complex (remember even ant behavior is considered complex and as you go higher up in the evolutionary tree of life that complexity only increases) not just due to an experience called life but also due to evolutionary histories perhaps spanning millions of years. But why is good programming difficult even though computers are simple (dumb really as their "intelligence" from the lowest level known as microprogramming to any deemed highest level is actually "programmed" by humans)? Because good programming actually is instructing humans including the programmer's future self about how the computer is being instructed. I present the quotes below to show bits about the craft of programming and writing in no particular order of importance.
Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter. - Eric Raymond
Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft. - Richard Stallman
Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do. - Donald Knuth
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. - Martin Fowler
In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. - Unknown
You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity. - John Romero
Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind. - Donald Knuth
Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence. - Edsger W. Dijkstra
Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little. - Bertrand Meyer
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians. - Edsger Dijkstra
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. - Edsger Dijkstra
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. - Brian W. Kernighan
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. - Edward V Berard
When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. - Richard Pattis
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. - Harold Abelson
Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable. - Per Brinch Hansen
Talk is cheap. Show me the code. - Linus Torvalds
Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else. - Eagleson's law
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. - Alan Kay
The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct. - Donald Ervin Knuth
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail. - Max Kanat-Alexander
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. - Brian Kernighan
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning. - Rick Cook
Programming is much much harder than doing mathematics. - Doron Zeilberger
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. - Bill Gates
If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as lines produced but as lines spent. - Edsger Dijkstra
Nine people can't make a baby in a month. - Fred Brooks
We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively. - Douglas Rushkoff
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living. - Gustave Flaubert
Tears are words that need to be written. - Paulo Coelho
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. - Albert Camus
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. - Isaac Asimov
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. - Franz Kafka
A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time - proof that humans can work magic. - Carl Sagan
I hate writing, I love having written. - Dorothy Parker
At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing – a sunset or an old shoe – in absolute and simple amazement. - Raymond Carver
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die. - Isaac Asimov
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. - George Orwell
As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out. - Mark Twain
That’s the great thing about fiction: You get to live all these different lives that aren’t yours. It’s almost like being an actor, where you put on all these different roles and become other people. It’s not me, it’s not my life, but I get to kind of experience it. - Alice Hoffman
This book is going on forever. And only with this attitude will it progress as I wish it to. - John Steinbeck
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams
How the mind rebels against work, but once working, it rebels just as harshly against stopping. I don’t know why this should be. It’s a dumb brute, the human mind. - John Steinbeck
I write when I am inspired and I see to it that I am inspired at nine o'clock every morning. - Peter DeVries
There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter ... Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine 'til noon or seven 'til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic. - Stephen King
I had no time to write – zero time. But I figured I could make time if I carved out little segments. I knew it would be a slow process, but I didn’t care because I was in no hurry. - John Grisham
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. - Robert Frost
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. - Saul Bellow
If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. - Stephen King
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. - Toni Morrison
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. - Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades
I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. - Robert Louis Stevenson
I write to discover what I know. - Flannery O'Connor
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. - Herman Melville
I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged. - Erica Jong