Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

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 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

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

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

Naipaul, V. S.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

10.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

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.

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

14.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

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

16.

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

Steinem, Gloria

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

21.

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

Joyce, James

22.

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

23.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Faulkner, William

27.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

28.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

29.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

30.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

31.

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

Pascal, Blaise

32.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

33.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

34.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

35.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

36.

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

Ellman, Lucy

37.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

38.

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

Thurber, James

39.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

41.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

42.

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

Sand, George

43.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

44.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

45.

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

46.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

47.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

48.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.