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

Butler, Samuel

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

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

Shaw, Irwin

11.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

13.

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

14.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

15.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

16.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

20.

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

21.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

22.

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

23.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

24.

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

25.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

26.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

27.

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

Rice, Anne

28.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

29.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

30.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

31.

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

32.

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

Martin, Judith

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

36.

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

Orwell, George

37.

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

Nicolson, Harold

38.

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

Woolf, Virginia

39.

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

Horace

40.

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.

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

44.

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.

45.

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

Zinsser, William

46.

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

Auden, W. H.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

50.

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