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

Miller, Olin

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

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

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

Faulkner, William

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

Kesey, Ken

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

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

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

Mortimer, John

10.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

11.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

12.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

13.

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

14.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

15.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

16.

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

17.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

18.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

19.

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

Steinem, Gloria

20.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

25.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

26.

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

Bach, Richard

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

29.

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

Collins, Jackie

30.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

31.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

32.

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

33.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

34.

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

Thurber, James

35.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

36.

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

Handke, Peter

37.

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.

38.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

39.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

40.

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

Marquis, Don

41.

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

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.

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

Corbett, James J.

44.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

45.

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

Burgess, Anthony

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.

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

48.

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

49.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

50.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre