Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

- Churchill, Winston

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Forster, Edward M.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

Benchley, Robert

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.

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

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

Ellman, Lucy

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

12.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

13.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

14.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

15.

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

Nunn, Gregory

16.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

17.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

18.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

19.

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

20.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

21.

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

Orwell, George

22.

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

23.

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

Mortimer, John

24.

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

Swift, Jonathan

25.

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

Gribbon, George

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

30.

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

Pascal, Blaise

31.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

32.

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

33.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

34.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Raine, Craig

39.

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

Vries, Peter De

40.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

41.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Rushdie, Salman

46.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

47.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

48.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

49.

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

50.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav