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

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

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

Pascal, Blaise

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

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

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

Shaw, Irwin

10.

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

11.

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

Murdoch, Iris

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

15.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

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

Rushdie, Salman

17.

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

Pound, Ezra

18.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

19.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

20.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

21.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

22.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

23.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

27.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

28.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

29.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

34.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

35.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

36.

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

Handke, Peter

37.

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

Zinsser, William

38.

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

Pascal, Blaise

39.

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

40.

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

Duncan, Isadora

41.

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

42.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

43.

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

44.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

45.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

46.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

47.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

48.

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