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

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

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

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

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

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

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

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

10.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

11.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

12.

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

Ellman, Lucy

13.

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

Faulkner, William

14.

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

Auden, W. H.

15.

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

Porter, Cole

16.

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

17.

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

Duncan, Isadora

18.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

19.

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.

Faulkner, William

20.

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

Hellman, Lillian

21.

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

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

24.

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

Butler, Samuel

25.

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

26.

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

Khayyam, Omar

27.

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

Murdoch, Iris

28.

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

Kesey, Ken

29.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

30.

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

Liebling, A. J.

31.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

32.

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.

33.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

34.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

35.

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

36.

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

Marx, Groucho

37.

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

Swift, Jonathan

38.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

39.

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

40.

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

Shaw, Irwin

41.

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

42.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

44.

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

45.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

46.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

47.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

48.

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

49.

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

Byron, Lord

50.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir