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

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

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

Auden, W. H.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

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

Freud, Sigmund

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

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

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

10.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

11.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

12.

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

13.

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

Kesey, Ken

14.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

15.

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

16.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

17.

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

Porter, Cole

18.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

19.

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

20.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

21.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

24.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

25.

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

Steinem, Gloria

26.

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

27.

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

Handke, Peter

28.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

29.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

30.

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

Faulkner, William

31.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

35.

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

36.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

37.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

Paz, Octavio

40.

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

Asimov, Isaac

41.

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

Bennett, Arnold

42.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

43.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

44.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

45.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

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

Thurber, James

48.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.