Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Bowen, Catherine Drinker

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

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

Porter, Cole

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

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

Handke, Peter

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

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

Steinem, Gloria

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

10.

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

Nicolson, Harold

11.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

12.

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

13.

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

14.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

15.

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

Pascal, Blaise

16.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

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

Freud, Sigmund

18.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

Steinbeck, John

20.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

22.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Auden, W. H.

26.

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

27.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

28.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

29.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

30.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

31.

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

Thurber, James

32.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

33.

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

Faulkner, William

34.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

36.

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

Sand, George

37.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

38.

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

39.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

40.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

45.

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

46.

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

Bennett, Arnold

47.

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

Hazlitt, William

48.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

49.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.