Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

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

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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

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

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

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

Russell, Bertrand

10.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

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

Paz, Octavio

12.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

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

14.

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

Horace

15.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

17.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

18.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

19.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

20.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

21.

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

Sontag, Susan

22.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

23.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

24.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

25.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

26.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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

31.

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

Anderson, Margaret

32.

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

Faulkner, William

33.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

34.

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

Steinem, Gloria

35.

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

36.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

38.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

39.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

40.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

41.

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

Liebling, A. J.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Thurber, James

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Benchley, Robert

48.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

49.

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

50.

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

Landor, Walter Savage