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

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

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

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Faulkner, William

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

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

Pascal, Blaise

10.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

11.

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

12.

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

Ferber, Edna

13.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

14.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

15.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

16.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

17.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

18.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

20.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

22.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

23.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

24.

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

Steinbeck, John

25.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Baldwin, James

29.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

30.

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

31.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

32.

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

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

35.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

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

Hellman, Lillian

37.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

38.

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

39.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

40.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

41.

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

42.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

43.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

44.

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

Auden, W. H.

45.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

46.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

47.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

48.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

49.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

50.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William