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

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

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

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

10.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

11.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

12.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

14.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

15.

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

Joyce, James

16.

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

Doren, Carl Van

17.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

18.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

19.

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

Russell, Bertrand

20.

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

21.

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

Steinbeck, John

22.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

23.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

24.

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

Pascal, Blaise

25.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

26.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

27.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

28.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

29.

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

Hutchens, John K.

30.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

Duncan, Isadora

33.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

34.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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.

36.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

37.

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

Hellman, Lillian

38.

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

Murdoch, Iris

39.

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

Thurber, James

40.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

41.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

42.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

43.

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

44.

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

Swift, Jonathan

45.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

46.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

47.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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