Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Benchley, Robert

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

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

Goodman, Ellen

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

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

Kraus, Karl

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

Hutchens, John K.

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.

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Steinem, Gloria

10.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

12.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

13.

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

14.

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

Marx, Groucho

15.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

16.

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

17.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

18.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

19.

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

20.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

21.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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

Bach, Richard

23.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

24.

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

25.

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

26.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

27.

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

Hellman, Lillian

28.

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

Benchley, Robert

29.

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

30.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

31.

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

32.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

34.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

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.

36.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

37.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

38.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

39.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

40.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

41.

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

42.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

43.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

44.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

45.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

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

Swift, Jonathan

47.

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

48.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

49.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

50.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan