Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

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

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

Thurber, James

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

10.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

11.

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

Murdoch, Iris

12.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

13.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

14.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

15.

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

16.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

17.

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.

18.

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.

19.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

20.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

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

22.

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

Steinbeck, John

23.

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

24.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

25.

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

26.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

27.

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.

28.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

29.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

30.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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

32.

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

Horace

33.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

34.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

35.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

36.

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

Swift, Jonathan

37.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

38.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

39.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

40.

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

Hellman, Lillian

41.

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

42.

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

Gribbon, George

43.

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

Anderson, Margaret

44.

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

Rushdie, Salman

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

48.

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

Benchley, Robert

49.

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

50.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin