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

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

Blanchot, Maurice

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

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

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

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

Raine, Craig

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

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

Steinbeck, John

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

10.

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

11.

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

Baldwin, James

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

16.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

17.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

19.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

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

21.

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

Ellman, Lucy

22.

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

23.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

24.

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

25.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

26.

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

Burgess, Anthony

27.

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

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

30.

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

Marx, Groucho

31.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

32.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Kraus, Karl

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

Zinsser, William

39.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

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

41.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

42.

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

Auden, W. H.

43.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

44.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

45.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

46.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

50.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell