Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

- Brookner, Anita

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

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

Porter, Cole

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

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

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

Nicolson, Harold

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

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

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

Thurber, James

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

10.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

11.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

12.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

13.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

14.

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

Liebling, A. J.

15.

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

Zinsser, William

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.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

18.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

19.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

20.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

21.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

22.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

23.

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

24.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

25.

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

Marquis, Don

26.

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

Kesey, Ken

27.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

31.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

32.

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

33.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

34.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

35.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

36.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

40.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

41.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

42.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

43.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

44.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

45.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

46.

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

47.

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

Horace

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset