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

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

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.

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

Thurber, James

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

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

Lawrence, D. H.

10.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

11.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

12.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

13.

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

Gribbon, George

14.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

15.

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

16.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

22.

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

23.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

24.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

25.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

26.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

27.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

28.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

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

Vries, Peter De

30.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

36.

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

Hutchens, John K.

37.

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

38.

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

Steinem, Gloria

39.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

40.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

41.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

42.

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

43.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

44.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

46.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.