Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Thurber, James

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

Fadiman, Clifton

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

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

Butler, Samuel

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

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

Byron, Lord

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

Steinbeck, John

10.

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

Joyce, James

11.

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

Martin, Judith

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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.

15.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

16.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

17.

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

18.

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

19.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

20.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

21.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

22.

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

23.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

24.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

25.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

26.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

27.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

30.

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

31.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

32.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

33.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

34.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

40.

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

41.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

42.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

43.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

44.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

45.

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

46.

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

Forster, Edward M.

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.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

49.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.