Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

- Bovee, Christian Nevell

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

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

Doren, Carl Van

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

Zinsser, William

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

10.

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

Forster, Edward M.

11.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

12.

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

Paz, Octavio

13.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

14.

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

15.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

17.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

18.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

19.

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

20.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

21.

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

22.

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

James, William

23.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

24.

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

Hutchens, John K.

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.

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

Steinbeck, John

27.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

28.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

29.

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

30.

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

Rushdie, Salman

31.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

32.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

33.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

34.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

35.

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

36.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

38.

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

Butler, Samuel

39.

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

Corbett, James J.

40.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

41.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

42.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

43.

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

Johnson, Samuel

44.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

45.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

46.

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

47.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

48.

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

Murdoch, Iris

49.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

50.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert