Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

- Brookner, Anita

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

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

Kraus, Karl

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

Horace

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

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

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Baldwin, James

10.

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

Asimov, Isaac

11.

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

12.

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

Steinbeck, John

13.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

14.

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

Canetti, Elias

15.

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

16.

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

Steinbeck, John

17.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

18.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

19.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

20.

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

Joyce, James

21.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

23.

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

24.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

25.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

26.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

33.

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

34.

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

Bach, Richard

35.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

36.

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

37.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

38.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

39.

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

James, William

40.

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

41.

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

42.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

43.

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

44.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

45.

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

Porter, Cole

46.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

47.

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

48.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

49.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

50.

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