Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

- Bovee, Christian Nevell

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

Anderson, Margaret

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

Bennett, Arnold

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

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

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

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.

10.

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

Murdoch, Iris

11.

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

12.

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

Bach, Richard

13.

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

Zinsser, William

14.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

15.

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

16.

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

Porter, Cole

17.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

18.

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

19.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

20.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

21.

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

22.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

23.

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

Duncan, Isadora

24.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

25.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

26.

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

27.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

28.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

29.

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

Pound, Ezra

30.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

31.

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

32.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

33.

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

Liebling, A. J.

34.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

35.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

36.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

39.

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

40.

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

Shaw, Irwin

41.

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

42.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

43.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

44.

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

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

47.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

48.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Paz, Octavio

50.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman