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

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

Thurber, James

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Rushdie, Salman

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

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

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

11.

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

Asimov, Isaac

12.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

13.

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

Ferber, Edna

14.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

15.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

16.

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

17.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

18.

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

19.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

20.

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

Forster, Edward M.

21.

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.

22.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

23.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

24.

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

Collins, Jackie

25.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

26.

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

Faulkner, William

27.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

28.

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

29.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

30.

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

31.

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

Joyce, James

32.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

33.

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

34.

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

35.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

36.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

37.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

38.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

39.

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

Marquis, Don

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Hutchens, John K.

43.

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

44.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

45.

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

Doren, Carl Van

46.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

47.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

48.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

49.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

50.

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

Fadiman, Clifton