Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Steinbeck, 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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Steinbeck, John

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

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

Liebling, A. J.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

10.

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

Forster, Edward M.

11.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

12.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

13.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

17.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

18.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

20.

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

Bach, Richard

21.

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

22.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

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.

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

Kesey, Ken

25.

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

26.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

27.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

28.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

33.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

34.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

35.

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

Pascal, Blaise

36.

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

Faulkner, William

37.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

39.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

40.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

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

42.

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

Murdoch, Iris

43.

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

44.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

45.

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

46.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

47.

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

Butler, Samuel

48.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

49.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

50.

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