Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

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

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Martin, Judith

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

Raine, Craig

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

11.

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

Zinsser, William

12.

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

Thurber, James

13.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

14.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

15.

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

Faulkner, William

16.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

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

Swift, Jonathan

18.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

19.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Butler, Samuel

23.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

24.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Zinsser, William

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

30.

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

Mortimer, John

31.

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

Faulkner, William

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

36.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

37.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

38.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

39.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

40.

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

Bennett, Arnold

41.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

Blanchot, Maurice

43.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

44.

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

Pound, Ezra

45.

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

46.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

47.

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

Paz, Octavio

48.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

49.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.