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

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

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

Rushdie, Salman

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Liebling, A. J.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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

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

10.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

11.

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

Nunn, Gregory

12.

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

13.

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

14.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

15.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

16.

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

Steinbeck, John

17.

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

18.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

19.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

20.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

21.

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

22.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

23.

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

Byron, Lord

24.

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

Rushdie, Salman

25.

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

James, William

26.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

27.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

28.

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

Steinbeck, John

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

31.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

32.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

33.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

34.

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

Russell, Bertrand

35.

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

Faulkner, William

36.

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

37.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

38.

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

Twain, Mark

39.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

40.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

41.

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

42.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

46.

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

47.

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