Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

Faulkner, William

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

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

Boileau, Nicholas

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

11.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

12.

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

13.

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

Nunn, Gregory

14.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

17.

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

18.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

19.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

20.

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

21.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

22.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

23.

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

24.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

25.

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

26.

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

Horace

27.

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

Baldwin, James

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

33.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

34.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

35.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

36.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

37.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

38.

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

Vries, Peter De

39.

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

40.

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

Anderson, Margaret

41.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

Kraus, Karl

43.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

45.

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

Russell, Bertrand

46.

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

Martin, Judith

47.

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

48.

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

49.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

50.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.