Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

- Aldiss, Brian

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

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

Faulkner, William

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

Kesey, Ken

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

Ellman, Lucy

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Lawrence, D. H.

10.

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

Corbett, James J.

11.

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

12.

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

Martin, Judith

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Butler, Samuel

16.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

17.

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.

18.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

19.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

20.

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

Dyer, Wayne

21.

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

Hellman, Lillian

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

24.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

25.

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

Rice, Anne

26.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

27.

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

28.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

29.

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

Nicolson, Harold

30.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

31.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

32.

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

33.

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

34.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

35.

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

36.

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

Zinsser, William

37.

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

38.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

39.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

40.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

41.

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

Faulkner, William

42.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

43.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

44.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

48.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

49.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

50.

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

Twain, Mark