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 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

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

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

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

Collins, Jackie

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Asimov, Isaac

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

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

Freud, Sigmund

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

10.

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

Rushdie, Salman

11.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

12.

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

13.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

14.

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

Horace

15.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

16.

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

Burgess, Anthony

17.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

18.

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

19.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

25.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

26.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

27.

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

Forster, Edward M.

28.

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

29.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

30.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

31.

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

Anderson, Margaret

32.

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

Raine, Craig

33.

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

Butler, Samuel

34.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

35.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

36.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

37.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

38.

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

Zinsser, William

39.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

40.

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

41.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

42.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

43.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

44.

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

Churchill, Charles

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Martin, Judith

48.

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

49.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

50.

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

Pound, Ezra