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

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

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

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Liebling, A. J.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

Benchley, Robert

10.

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

Doren, Carl Van

11.

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

12.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

13.

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

14.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

15.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

16.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

17.

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

Bach, Richard

18.

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

19.

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

Sand, George

20.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

21.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

22.

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

23.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

Handke, Peter

26.

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

27.

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

Swift, Jonathan

28.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

29.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

30.

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

31.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

32.

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

Butler, Samuel

33.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

34.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

35.

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

36.

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

Thurber, James

37.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

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

42.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

43.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

44.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

45.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

49.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

50.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord