Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Canetti, Elias

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

Pascal, Blaise

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Hutchens, John K.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Woolf, Virginia

10.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

11.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

12.

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

Joyce, James

13.

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

14.

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

Byron, Lord

15.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

16.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

21.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

22.

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

Anderson, Margaret

23.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

24.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

25.

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

26.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

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.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

29.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

30.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

31.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

32.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

33.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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 you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

40.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

41.

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

42.

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

Faulkner, William

43.

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

Asimov, Isaac

44.

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

45.

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

Freud, Sigmund

46.

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

47.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton