Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Bach, Richard

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

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

Landor, Walter Savage

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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.

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

Dennis, Patrick

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

10.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

13.

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

14.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

15.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

16.

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

Burgess, Anthony

17.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

Liebling, A. J.

19.

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

Freud, Sigmund

20.

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

21.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

22.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

23.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

24.

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

Gribbon, George

25.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

26.

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

27.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

28.

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

29.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

30.

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

Benchley, Robert

31.

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

32.

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

Shaw, Irwin

33.

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

34.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

35.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

36.

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

37.

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

Kraus, Karl

38.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

39.

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

40.

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

Marquis, Don

41.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

42.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

43.

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

Horace

44.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

Woolf, Virginia

46.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

47.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

48.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

49.

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

Duncan, Isadora

50.

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