Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Borges, Jorge Luis

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

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

Handke, Peter

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.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

Naipaul, V. S.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

10.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

11.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

12.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

13.

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

14.

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

Rushdie, Salman

15.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

16.

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

Murdoch, Iris

17.

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

Pascal, Blaise

18.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

19.

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

20.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

21.

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

James, William

22.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

23.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

24.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

25.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

26.

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

Thurber, James

27.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

28.

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

Anderson, Margaret

29.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

30.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

31.

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

Liebling, A. J.

32.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

33.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

34.

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

Gribbon, George

35.

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

36.

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

Mencken, H. L.

37.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

38.

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

Nicolson, Harold

39.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

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.

41.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

42.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

43.

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

44.

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

Steinbeck, John

45.

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

46.

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

Ellman, Lucy

47.

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

Faulkner, William

48.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

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

50.

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