Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

- Anderson, Margaret

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

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

Baldwin, James

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

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

Pound, Ezra

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

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

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

10.

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

11.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

12.

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

Benchley, Robert

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Doren, Carl Van

16.

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

17.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

21.

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

22.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

23.

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

Goodman, Ellen

24.

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

25.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

26.

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

Gribbon, George

27.

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

28.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

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

Canetti, Elias

30.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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

32.

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

33.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

34.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

35.

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

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

38.

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

Churchill, Charles

39.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

40.

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

Raine, Craig

41.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

42.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

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

44.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

48.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

49.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

50.

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