Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

- Bowen, Catherine Drinker

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

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

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

Vries, Peter De

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

10.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

11.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

13.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

14.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

15.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

16.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

17.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

18.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

19.

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

Anderson, Margaret

20.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

21.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

22.

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

23.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

24.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

25.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

26.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

27.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

30.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

31.

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

Sand, George

32.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

33.

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

Hellman, Lillian

34.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

35.

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

36.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

37.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

38.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

39.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

40.

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

41.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

42.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

43.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

44.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

45.

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

46.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

47.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

48.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

49.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

50.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril