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 walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

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

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

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Churchill, Charles

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

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

Rushdie, Salman

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

Mencken, H. L.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

10.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

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

Pascal, Blaise

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.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

14.

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

15.

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

Porter, Cole

16.

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

17.

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

Canetti, Elias

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Collins, Jackie

21.

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

Duncan, Isadora

22.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

23.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

24.

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

Bach, Richard

25.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

30.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

31.

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

Raine, Craig

32.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Gribbon, George

36.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

37.

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

Benchley, Robert

38.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

39.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

40.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

41.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

42.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

43.

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

Nunn, Gregory

44.

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

45.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

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

Marx, Groucho

47.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

48.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.