Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

- Bagehot, Walter

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

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

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

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

Boileau, Nicholas

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

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.

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

Bach, Richard

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

10.

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

Zinsser, William

11.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

12.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

13.

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

14.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

15.

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

Burgess, Anthony

16.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

17.

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

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

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

Anderson, Margaret

20.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

21.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

22.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

23.

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

Twain, Mark

24.

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

25.

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

Murdoch, Iris

26.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

27.

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

28.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

29.

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

30.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

31.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

32.

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

Benchley, Robert

33.

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

Woolf, Virginia

34.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

36.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

37.

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

Kraus, Karl

38.

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

Faulkner, William

39.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

43.

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

Mencken, H. L.

44.

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

Dennis, Patrick

45.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

46.

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

47.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

48.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

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

50.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen