Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

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

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

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

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

Zinsser, William

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Liebling, A. J.

10.

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

Handke, Peter

11.

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

12.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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.

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

Bach, Richard

15.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

16.

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

Ferber, Edna

17.

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

18.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

19.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

20.

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

21.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

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

23.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

24.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

25.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

26.

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

Nicolson, Harold

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

30.

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

Pascal, Blaise

31.

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

32.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

Thurber, James

37.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

38.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

39.

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

40.

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

Baldwin, James

41.

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.

42.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

43.

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

Zinsser, William

44.

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

Benchley, Robert

45.

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

Kraus, Karl

46.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

47.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

48.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

49.

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

Joyce, James

50.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.