Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

- Bagehot, Walter

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Swift, Jonathan

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

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.

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

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

Goodman, Ellen

10.

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

Benchley, Robert

11.

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

12.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

16.

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

Horace

17.

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

18.

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

Marquis, Don

19.

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

Liebling, A. J.

20.

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

Thurber, James

21.

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

Bach, Richard

22.

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

23.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

25.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

26.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

27.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

28.

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

Orwell, George

29.

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

30.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

31.

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

Kesey, Ken

32.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

36.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

39.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

40.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

41.

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

42.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

43.

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

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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

46.

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

Dennis, Patrick

47.

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

Russell, Bertrand

48.

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

49.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

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