Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

- Brodsky, Joseph

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Baldwin, James

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Boileau, Nicholas

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

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Bennett, Arnold

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

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

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

Paz, Octavio

10.

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

Dyer, Wayne

11.

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

12.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

13.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

14.

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

15.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

16.

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

Freud, Sigmund

17.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

18.

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

19.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Faulkner, William

25.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

26.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

27.

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

Forster, Edward M.

28.

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

Sand, George

29.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

30.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

31.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

32.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

33.

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

Thurber, James

34.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

38.

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

Steinbeck, John

39.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

40.

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

41.

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

Porter, Cole

42.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

43.

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

44.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

45.

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

Zinsser, William

46.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

47.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

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

50.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von