Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Boileau, Nicholas

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

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

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.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

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

Zinsser, William

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

10.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

11.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

12.

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

13.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

14.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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.

18.

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

Doren, Carl Van

19.

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

20.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

21.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

22.

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

23.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

28.

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

29.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

Steinbeck, John

32.

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

33.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

34.

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

Duncan, Isadora

35.

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

Hutchens, John K.

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

39.

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

Ellman, Lucy

40.

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

Joyce, James

41.

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

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

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

44.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

48.

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

49.

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

Goodman, Ellen

50.

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