Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Boileau, Nicholas

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

Shaw, Irwin

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

Dennis, Patrick

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

10.

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

11.

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

12.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

13.

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

Duncan, Isadora

14.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

21.

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

Sand, George

22.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

26.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

27.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

28.

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

29.

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

Porter, Cole

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Zinsser, William

34.

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

James, William

35.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

37.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

43.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

44.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

45.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

46.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

47.

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

48.

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

Marx, Groucho

49.

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

50.

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