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

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Asimov, Isaac

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

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

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

James, William

10.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

11.

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

12.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

13.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

15.

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

16.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

17.

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

18.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

19.

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

20.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

21.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

22.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

23.

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

24.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

25.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

26.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

27.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

28.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

29.

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

Zinsser, William

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

33.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

34.

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

Mencken, H. L.

35.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

36.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

38.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

39.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

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

Ellman, Lucy

41.

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

42.

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

Forster, Edward M.

43.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

44.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

47.

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

48.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

49.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

50.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest