Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

Steinbeck, John

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.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

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

Zinsser, William

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

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

Johnson, Samuel

10.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

11.

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

Benchley, Robert

12.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

13.

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

Burgess, Anthony

14.

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

Freud, Sigmund

15.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

16.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

17.

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

18.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

19.

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

Sand, George

20.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

21.

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

22.

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

23.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

24.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

25.

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

26.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

31.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

32.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

33.

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

34.

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

Marquis, Don

35.

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

36.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

37.

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

38.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

39.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

40.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

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

Kesey, Ken

42.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

44.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

45.

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

Dennis, Patrick

46.

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

Mortimer, John

47.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

48.

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

Canetti, Elias