Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Burgess, Anthony

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Faulkner, William

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

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

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

Porter, Cole

10.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

12.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

13.

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

Woolf, Virginia

14.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

15.

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.

16.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

17.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

18.

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

19.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

20.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

24.

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

25.

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

Rosten, Leo

26.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

27.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

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

Baldwin, James

29.

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

30.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

31.

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

Pascal, Blaise

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

34.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

36.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

37.

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

38.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

39.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

41.

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

Churchill, Charles

42.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

43.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

45.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

46.

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

Pascal, Blaise

47.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

48.

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

49.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

50.

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

Duncan, Isadora