Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Butler, Samuel

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

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

Swift, Jonathan

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

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

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

11.

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.

12.

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

Gribbon, George

13.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

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

Zinsser, William

15.

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

16.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

17.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

18.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

19.

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

20.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

21.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

22.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

23.

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

24.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

25.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

29.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

30.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

31.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

32.

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

Dennis, Patrick

33.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

34.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

35.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

36.

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

Murdoch, Iris

37.

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

Pascal, Blaise

38.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

39.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

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

Marquis, Don

41.

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

Byron, Lord

42.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

43.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

44.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

45.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

46.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

50.

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

Thurber, James