Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

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

Pound, Ezra

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

10.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

11.

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

12.

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

Russell, Bertrand

13.

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

Churchill, Charles

14.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

17.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

18.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

19.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

20.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

21.

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

Nicolson, Harold

22.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

23.

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

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

28.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

29.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

30.

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

31.

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

James, William

32.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

33.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

34.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

35.

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

Zinsser, William

36.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

37.

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

38.

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

Canetti, Elias

39.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

41.

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

Vries, Peter De

42.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

46.

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

Asimov, Isaac

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

Handke, Peter

50.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa