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

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

James, William

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

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

Pound, Ezra

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

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

Sontag, Susan

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

Goodman, Ellen

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

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

Pound, Ezra

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

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

Russell, Bertrand

15.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

16.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

17.

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

Porter, Cole

18.

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

19.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

20.

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

21.

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

22.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

23.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

24.

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

Murdoch, Iris

25.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

26.

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

Steinem, Gloria

27.

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

Twain, Mark

28.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

29.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

30.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

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

Baldwin, James

32.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

33.

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

34.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

35.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

36.

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

37.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

38.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

39.

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

Faulkner, William

40.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

41.

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

Joyce, James

42.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

43.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

44.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

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

Anderson, Margaret

47.

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

48.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

49.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

50.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan