Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Collins, Jackie

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Churchill, Charles

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

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

Mortimer, John

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

Goodman, Ellen

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

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

10.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

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

13.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

14.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

18.

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

Corbett, James J.

19.

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

Faulkner, William

20.

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

Dennis, Patrick

21.

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

22.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

27.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

Russell, Bertrand

30.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

31.

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

Forster, Edward M.

32.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

33.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

34.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

35.

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

36.

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

Ellman, Lucy

37.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

38.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

39.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

46.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

47.

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

Faulkner, William

48.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

49.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

50.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin