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

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

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

Raine, Craig

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

Boileau, Nicholas

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

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

Horace

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

10.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

11.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

12.

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

Faulkner, William

13.

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

Kraus, Karl

14.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

15.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

16.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

17.

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

18.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

20.

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

Dyer, Wayne

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Paz, Octavio

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

26.

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

Russell, Bertrand

27.

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

28.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

34.

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

35.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

36.

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

Forster, Edward M.

37.

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

Goodman, Ellen

38.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

39.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

40.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

Pascal, Blaise

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

48.

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

Bach, Richard

49.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

50.

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

Johnson, Samuel