Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Bach, Richard

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

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

Zinsser, William

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

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

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

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

Faulkner, William

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

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

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

Freud, Sigmund

10.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

11.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

12.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

13.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

14.

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

15.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

16.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

17.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

18.

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

19.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

20.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

21.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

22.

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

23.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Vries, Peter De

27.

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

28.

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

Horace

29.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

30.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

31.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

32.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

33.

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

34.

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

Zinsser, William

35.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Steinbeck, John

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

41.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

42.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

43.

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

44.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

45.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

46.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

47.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

48.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

49.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

50.

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