Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hellman, Lillian

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

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

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

Rice, Anne

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

Faulkner, William

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

Mortimer, John

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

Russell, Bertrand

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

10.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

11.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

12.

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

13.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

15.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

16.

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

Martin, Judith

17.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

18.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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

Duncan, Isadora

20.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Woolf, Virginia

24.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

25.

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

Vries, Peter De

26.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

27.

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

28.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

30.

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

31.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

32.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Faulkner, William

35.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

36.

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

37.

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

Hazlitt, William

38.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

39.

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

Steinbeck, John

40.

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

Butler, Samuel

41.

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

Paz, Octavio

42.

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

43.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

44.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

45.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

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.

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

Nicolson, Harold

48.

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

Burgess, Anthony

49.

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

50.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.