Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

- Bennett, Arnold

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

Rice, Anne

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

Faulkner, William

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

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

10.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

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.

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

13.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

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

15.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

16.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

17.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

18.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

19.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

20.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

21.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

22.

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

23.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

24.

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

25.

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

Steinem, Gloria

26.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

27.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Hazlitt, William

31.

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

Horace

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

35.

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

36.

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

Mortimer, John

37.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

38.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

39.

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

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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.

41.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

42.

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

43.

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

44.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Handke, Peter

48.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

49.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

50.

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

Marx, Groucho