Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Benchley, Robert

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Sontag, Susan

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

10.

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

Duncan, Isadora

11.

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

Ellman, Lucy

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

14.

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

15.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

16.

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

17.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

18.

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

Anderson, Margaret

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

22.

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

23.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

24.

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

Byron, Lord

25.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

26.

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

27.

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

Pound, Ezra

28.

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

Faulkner, William

29.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

30.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

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

Asimov, Isaac

32.

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

Doren, Carl Van

33.

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

Nunn, Gregory

34.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

35.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

36.

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

Collins, Jackie

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

42.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

43.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

45.

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

Paz, Octavio

46.

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

47.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

48.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

49.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

50.

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