Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

- Cather, Willa

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

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

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Collins, Jackie

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

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

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

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

10.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

11.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

12.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

13.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

14.

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

Rushdie, Salman

15.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

16.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

21.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

22.

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

Benchley, Robert

23.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

24.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

25.

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

Marquis, Don

26.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

27.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

28.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

29.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

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

Handke, Peter

31.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

32.

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

33.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

34.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

35.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

36.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

37.

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

Raine, Craig

38.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

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.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

46.

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

Asimov, Isaac

47.

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

48.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

49.

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

Corbett, James J.

50.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William