Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Asimov, Isaac

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

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

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

10.

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

Butler, Samuel

11.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

12.

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

13.

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

Anderson, Margaret

14.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

15.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

16.

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

Zinsser, William

17.

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

Kesey, Ken

18.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

19.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

21.

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

22.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

23.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

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

25.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

26.

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

Zinsser, William

27.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

28.

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

29.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

30.

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

James, William

31.

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

32.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

38.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

39.

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

40.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

41.

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

Churchill, Charles

42.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

43.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

44.

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

45.

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

46.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

47.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

49.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

50.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William