Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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.

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

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

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

Ferber, Edna

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

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

10.

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

11.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

12.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

13.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

15.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

21.

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

Forster, Edward M.

22.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

23.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

24.

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

25.

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

Orwell, George

26.

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

27.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

28.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

29.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

30.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

31.

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

32.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

33.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

34.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

35.

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

Duncan, Isadora

36.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

37.

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

Pascal, Blaise

38.

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

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

Corbett, James J.

44.

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

45.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

46.

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

Nicolson, Harold

47.

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

48.

Writing is a craft not an art.