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

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

Baldwin, James

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

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

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

Dyer, Wayne

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

Russell, Bertrand

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

Rice, Anne

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

10.

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

Butler, Samuel

11.

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

12.

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

Miller, Olin

13.

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

14.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

15.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

16.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

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

18.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

19.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

20.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

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

22.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

23.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

24.

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

Vries, Peter De

25.

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.

26.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

27.

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

Joyce, James

28.

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

29.

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

Asimov, Isaac

30.

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

Forster, Edward M.

31.

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

32.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

36.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

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

James, William

38.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

39.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

40.

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

41.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

Horace

43.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

44.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

45.

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

Kraus, Karl

46.

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

47.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

48.

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

Pound, Ezra

49.

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

Nicolson, Harold

50.

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