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

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Wilde, Oscar

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Swift, Jonathan

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

Shaw, Irwin

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Rushdie, Salman

15.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

16.

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

Kesey, Ken

17.

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

Butler, Samuel

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Pascal, Blaise

22.

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

Porter, Cole

23.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

24.

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

25.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

26.

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

Corbett, James J.

27.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

32.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

33.

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

Duncan, Isadora

34.

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

35.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

36.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

38.

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

39.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

41.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

42.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

43.

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

Gribbon, George

44.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

46.

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

47.

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

Orwell, George

48.

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

49.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

50.

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