Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Steinbeck, John

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

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

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

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

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

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

Asimov, Isaac

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

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

Gribbon, George

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

10.

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

Anderson, Margaret

11.

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

Butler, Samuel

12.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

13.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

14.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

15.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

16.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

17.

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.

18.

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.

19.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

20.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

21.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

22.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

23.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

24.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

25.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

26.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

27.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

28.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Vries, Peter De

30.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

31.

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

Hellman, Lillian

32.

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

Woolf, Virginia

33.

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

34.

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

Benchley, Robert

35.

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

Nicolson, Harold

36.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

37.

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

Duncan, Isadora

38.

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

39.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

40.

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

Swift, Jonathan

41.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

42.

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

Burgess, Anthony

43.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

44.

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

Doren, Carl Van

45.

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

Benchley, Robert

46.

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

Corbett, James J.

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.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

49.

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

50.

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