Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Dahlberg, Edward

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

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

Rice, Anne

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

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

James, William

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

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

10.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

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

Zinsser, William

13.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

14.

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

15.

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

Marx, Groucho

16.

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

Vries, Peter De

17.

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

18.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

22.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

23.

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

Steinbeck, John

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

28.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

29.

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

Asimov, Isaac

30.

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

Faulkner, William

31.

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

Horace

32.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

33.

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

34.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

35.

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

36.

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

Forster, Edward M.

37.

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

Corbett, James J.

38.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

39.

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.

40.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

41.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

43.

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

Baldwin, James

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.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

48.

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

49.

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

Goodman, Ellen

50.

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