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

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

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

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

Faulkner, William

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Anderson, Margaret

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

Rosten, Leo

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Baldwin, James

12.

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

13.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

14.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

16.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

17.

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

Marx, Groucho

18.

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

Churchill, Charles

19.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

20.

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

Swift, Jonathan

21.

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

22.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

23.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

26.

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

Liebling, A. J.

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

Auden, W. H.

29.

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

30.

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

Bennett, Arnold

31.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

32.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

33.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

34.

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

35.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

36.

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

Rushdie, Salman

37.

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

38.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

39.

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.

40.

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

Martin, Judith

41.

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

Pound, Ezra

42.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

43.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

44.

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

45.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

46.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

47.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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

Burgess, Anthony

49.

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

50.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus