Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Bach, Richard

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Zinsser, William

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Faulkner, William

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

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

Butler, Samuel

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

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

10.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

11.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

12.

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

13.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

14.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

15.

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

16.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

17.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

18.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

19.

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

Hellman, Lillian

20.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

21.

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

Martin, Judith

22.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

23.

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

Murdoch, Iris

24.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

25.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

Rosten, Leo

27.

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

28.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

29.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

30.

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

31.

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

Bach, Richard

32.

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

33.

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

34.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

36.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

37.

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

38.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

39.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

40.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

45.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

47.

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

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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