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 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

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

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

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

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

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

10.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

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

12.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

13.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

14.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

15.

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

16.

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

Porter, Cole

17.

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

Dennis, Patrick

18.

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

19.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

20.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

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

22.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

23.

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

24.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

25.

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

26.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

27.

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

28.

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

Thurber, James

29.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

33.

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

Benchley, Robert

34.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

35.

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

36.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

37.

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

Canetti, Elias

38.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

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.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

41.

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

42.

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

Steinbeck, John

43.

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

Asimov, Isaac

44.

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