Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Bach, Richard

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

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.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

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

Hellman, Lillian

10.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

11.

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

Thurber, James

12.

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

13.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

14.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

18.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

19.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

20.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

21.

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

22.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

23.

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

Raine, Craig

24.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

25.

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

Rosten, Leo

26.

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

Anderson, Margaret

27.

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

28.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Mencken, H. L.

33.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

34.

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

Rice, Anne

35.

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

Miller, Olin

36.

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

Mortimer, John

37.

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

38.

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

Hazlitt, William

39.

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

Hutchens, John K.

40.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Churchill, Charles

44.

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

Rushdie, Salman

45.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

46.

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

47.

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

Vries, Peter De

48.

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

49.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

50.

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