Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

- Pinter, Harold

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

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

Faulkner, William

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

Joyce, James

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

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

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

Faulkner, William

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Duncan, Isadora

10.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

12.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

13.

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

Benchley, Robert

14.

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

Dyer, Wayne

15.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

16.

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

Martin, Judith

17.

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

Rice, Anne

18.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

19.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

20.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

21.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

22.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

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

Gribbon, George

27.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

30.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

31.

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

32.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

33.

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

34.

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

Forster, Edward M.

35.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

36.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

38.

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

Canetti, Elias

39.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

40.

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

Steinbeck, John

41.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

42.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

43.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

44.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

45.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

46.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

47.

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

48.

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

James, William

49.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

50.

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