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

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

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

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

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

10.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

11.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

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

Sand, George

13.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

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

15.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

16.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

17.

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

Butler, Samuel

18.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

19.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

20.

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

Dennis, Patrick

21.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

22.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

23.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

24.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

25.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

26.

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

Hellman, Lillian

27.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

28.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

29.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

30.

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

31.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

32.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

33.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

34.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

35.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

36.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

37.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

38.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

39.

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

Zinsser, William

40.

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

Swift, Jonathan

41.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

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

43.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

44.

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

45.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

46.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

47.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

48.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

49.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

50.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John