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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

Dyer, Wayne

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

Dahlberg, Edward

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

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

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

10.

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

Steinem, Gloria

11.

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

12.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

13.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

Woolf, Virginia

18.

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

Zinsser, William

19.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

20.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

21.

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

22.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

23.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

24.

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

25.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

26.

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

27.

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

28.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

29.

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

Faulkner, William

30.

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

Liebling, A. J.

31.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

32.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

33.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

34.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

35.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

36.

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

Nicolson, Harold

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

40.

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

41.

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

42.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

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

Hellman, Lillian

48.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

49.

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