Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

Faulkner, William

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

Hellman, Lillian

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

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

Orwell, George

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

Porter, Cole

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

10.

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

Kesey, Ken

11.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

12.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

13.

Brooks, Mel

14.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

15.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

16.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

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

Auden, W. H.

18.

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

Steinbeck, John

19.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

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

Goodman, Ellen

21.

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

22.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

23.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

24.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

25.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

26.

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

27.

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

Dyer, Wayne

28.

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

Horace

29.

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

30.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

31.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

32.

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

33.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

34.

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

Pound, Ezra

35.

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

Bennett, Arnold

36.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Zinsser, William

42.

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

Canetti, Elias

43.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

47.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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