Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

- Bach, Richard

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

Butler, Samuel

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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

Forster, Edward M.

10.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

11.

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

Steinbeck, John

12.

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

Pascal, Blaise

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

17.

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

Liebling, A. J.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

22.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

23.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

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.

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

Doren, Carl Van

26.

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

27.

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

Duncan, Isadora

28.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

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.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

31.

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

32.

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

Ferber, Edna

33.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

34.

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

Collins, Jackie

35.

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

Steinbeck, John

36.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

Shaw, Irwin

38.

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

Hellman, Lillian

39.

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

Zinsser, William

40.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

41.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

42.

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

43.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

44.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

Nunn, Gregory

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

49.

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

50.

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

Hemingway, Ernest