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

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

Fadiman, Clifton

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

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

Steinbeck, John

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

10.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

11.

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

Raine, Craig

12.

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

Paz, Octavio

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.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

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

16.

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

Zinsser, William

17.

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

Horace

18.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

19.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

20.

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

21.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

24.

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

Zinsser, William

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

30.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

31.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

32.

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

Marquis, Don

33.

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

Kraus, Karl

34.

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

35.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

36.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

37.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

39.

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

40.

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

41.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

43.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

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

Pound, Ezra

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Canetti, Elias

48.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

49.

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

50.

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

Forster, Edward M.