Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

- Boileau, Nicholas

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Paz, Octavio

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

Woolf, Virginia

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

Mencken, H. L.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

10.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

11.

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

Pound, Ezra

12.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

13.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

14.

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

Asimov, Isaac

15.

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

16.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

17.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

18.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

19.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

20.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

21.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

22.

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

23.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

24.

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

Faulkner, William

25.

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

26.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

27.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

28.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

Bach, Richard

31.

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

Churchill, Charles

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.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

34.

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

Doren, Carl Van

35.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

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

Hutchens, John K.

37.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

38.

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

39.

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

Canetti, Elias

40.

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

41.

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

Steinbeck, John

42.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

43.

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

44.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

45.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Butler, Samuel