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

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

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

Thurber, James

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

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

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

Lawrence, D. H.

10.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

12.

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

Ferber, Edna

13.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

15.

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

16.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

17.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

18.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

19.

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

Kraus, Karl

20.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

21.

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

Russell, Bertrand

22.

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

23.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

24.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

25.

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

26.

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

James, William

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Benchley, Robert

30.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

31.

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

Hazlitt, William

32.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

33.

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

Twain, Mark

34.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

35.

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

Woolf, Virginia

36.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

37.

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

38.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

40.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

41.

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.

42.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

43.

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

44.

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

Murdoch, Iris

45.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

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

Thurber, James

47.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

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

49.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.