Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

- Bagehot, Walter

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

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

Kesey, Ken

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

10.

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

Liebling, A. J.

11.

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

12.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

13.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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.

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

Kraus, Karl

16.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

17.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

18.

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

19.

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

Auden, W. H.

20.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

21.

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

Pascal, Blaise

22.

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

23.

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

Thurber, James

24.

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

25.

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

Porter, Cole

26.

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

27.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

28.

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

29.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

30.

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.

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Hellman, Lillian

35.

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

Dennis, Patrick

36.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

37.

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

38.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

39.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

43.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

44.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

45.

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

46.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

47.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

48.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

49.

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

50.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker