Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

- Blanchot, Maurice

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

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

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

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

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

10.

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

Pascal, Blaise

11.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

12.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

13.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

15.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

16.

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

Rice, Anne

17.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

18.

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

Russell, Bertrand

19.

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

20.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

21.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

22.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

23.

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

Miller, Olin

24.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

25.

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

Pound, Ezra

26.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

27.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

28.

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

Corbett, James J.

29.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

30.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

31.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

32.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

36.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

38.

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

Forster, Edward M.

39.

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

Collins, Jackie

40.

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

Byron, Lord

41.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

42.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

43.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

44.

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

Pound, Ezra

45.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

46.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

47.

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

Faulkner, William

48.

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

Marx, Groucho

49.

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

Shaw, Irwin

50.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.