Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

- Amis, Martin

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

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

Raine, Craig

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Goodman, Ellen

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.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

13.

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

Marquis, Don

14.

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

15.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

16.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

17.

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

Rice, Anne

18.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

19.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

20.

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

21.

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

Forster, Edward M.

22.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

23.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

24.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

25.

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

Doren, Carl Van

26.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

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

Nicolson, Harold

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

Zinsser, William

30.

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

31.

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

Dyer, Wayne

32.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

33.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

34.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

35.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

36.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

37.

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

38.

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

Rushdie, Salman

39.

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

40.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

42.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

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.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

50.

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

Miller, Olin