Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

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

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

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

Marx, Groucho

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

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

10.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

11.

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

12.

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

13.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

14.

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

Joyce, James

15.

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

16.

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

Benchley, Robert

17.

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

Faulkner, William

18.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

19.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

20.

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

Zinsser, William

21.

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

22.

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

Doren, Carl Van

23.

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

Duncan, Isadora

24.

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

Ellman, Lucy

25.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

27.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

28.

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

29.

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

30.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

31.

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

32.

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

Mencken, H. L.

33.

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

34.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

35.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

36.

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

37.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

38.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

39.

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

Anderson, Margaret

40.

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

41.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

42.

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

Vries, Peter De

43.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

44.

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

45.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

46.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Pascal, Blaise

50.

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