Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

- Faulkner, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

Murdoch, Iris

11.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

12.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

13.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

14.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

15.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

16.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

17.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

18.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

19.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

20.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

21.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

22.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

23.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

24.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

25.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

26.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

27.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

28.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

29.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

31.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

32.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

33.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

34.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

35.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

37.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

38.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

39.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

40.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

41.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

42.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

43.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

44.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

45.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

46.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

47.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

48.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

49.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

50.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.