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

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

Ferber, Edna

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

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

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

Handke, Peter

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

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

11.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

12.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

13.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

14.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

15.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

16.

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

Bennett, Arnold

17.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

18.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

19.

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

Pound, Ezra

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

Dyer, Wayne

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

27.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

29.

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

Steinbeck, John

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

33.

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

34.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

35.

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

Steinem, Gloria

36.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

37.

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

Auden, W. H.

38.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

39.

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

Marx, Groucho

40.

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

Hazlitt, William

41.

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

Raine, Craig

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

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

Forster, Edward M.

47.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

48.

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

Benchley, Robert

49.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

50.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus