Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

- Bowen, Catherine Drinker

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

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.

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

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

10.

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

11.

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

Nicolson, Harold

12.

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

13.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

14.

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

Mencken, H. L.

15.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Ellman, Lucy

19.

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

Joyce, James

20.

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

Thurber, James

21.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

22.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

23.

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

24.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

25.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

26.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

27.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

28.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

29.

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.

30.

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

Vries, Peter De

31.

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

32.

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

Ferber, Edna

33.

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

34.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

35.

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

Rushdie, Salman

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

38.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

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

40.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

41.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

44.

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

Shaw, Irwin

45.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

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

47.

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

Handke, Peter

48.

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

49.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

50.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis