Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

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

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Kraus, Karl

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

Byron, Lord

11.

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

Swift, Jonathan

12.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

13.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Doren, Carl Van

17.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

18.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

19.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

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

Paz, Octavio

21.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

22.

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

23.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

24.

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

25.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

26.

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

Goodman, Ellen

27.

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

Auden, W. H.

28.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

29.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

30.

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

Dennis, Patrick

31.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

32.

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

33.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

34.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

35.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

36.

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

Benchley, Robert

37.

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

38.

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

Freud, Sigmund

39.

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

40.

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

Murdoch, Iris

41.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

42.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

43.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

44.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

45.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Baldwin, James

49.

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

Anderson, Margaret

50.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond