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

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

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

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.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

11.

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

12.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

13.

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

Kesey, Ken

14.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

15.

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

Joyce, James

16.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

17.

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

18.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

19.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

20.

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

21.

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

Asimov, Isaac

22.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

23.

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

Nicolson, Harold

24.

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

Murdoch, Iris

25.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

Hutchens, John K.

27.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

28.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

29.

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

30.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

31.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

32.

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

33.

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

Benchley, Robert

34.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

35.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

36.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

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

41.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

42.

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

Twain, Mark

43.

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

44.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

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

Faulkner, William

48.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

49.

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.

50.

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