Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Churchill, Charles

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Goodman, Ellen

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

Kraus, Karl

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

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

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

Burgess, Anthony

10.

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

Handke, Peter

11.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

12.

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

Mencken, H. L.

13.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

14.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

15.

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

Rushdie, Salman

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

18.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

19.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

20.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

21.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

22.

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

Sontag, Susan

23.

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

Twain, Mark

24.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

25.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

27.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

28.

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

Ferber, Edna

29.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

30.

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

31.

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

32.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

33.

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

Steinbeck, John

34.

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

Pound, Ezra

35.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

36.

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

Martin, Judith

37.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

38.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

39.

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

40.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

41.

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

Nicolson, Harold

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

46.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

47.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

48.

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

Asimov, Isaac

49.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.