Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Byron, Lord

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

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

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

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Ferber, Edna

10.

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

Hutchens, John K.

11.

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

Kesey, Ken

12.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

13.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

14.

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

Handke, Peter

15.

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

Dennis, Patrick

16.

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

Rosten, Leo

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

21.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

22.

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

Duncan, Isadora

23.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

24.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

25.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

28.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

29.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

30.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

31.

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.

32.

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.

33.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

34.

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

35.

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

Pascal, Blaise

36.

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

Faulkner, William

37.

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.

38.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

39.

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

40.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

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

42.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

43.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

44.

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

Benchley, Robert

45.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

46.

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

Pound, Ezra

47.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

48.

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.

49.

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

Nicolson, Harold

50.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest