Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Rushdie, Salman

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Raine, Craig

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

Landor, Walter Savage

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

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

Boileau, Nicholas

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

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

10.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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.

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

Ferber, Edna

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Corbett, James J.

16.

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

Shaw, Irwin

17.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

18.

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

19.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

22.

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

23.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

24.

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

Steinbeck, John

25.

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

26.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

27.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

28.

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

Butler, Samuel

29.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

30.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

31.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

32.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

33.

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

34.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

35.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

36.

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

Dennis, Patrick

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

40.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

41.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

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

Nunn, Gregory

44.

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

45.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

46.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

47.

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

48.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

49.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

50.

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

Anderson, Margaret