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 hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

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

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Rushdie, Salman

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

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

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

Ferber, Edna

10.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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

12.

Cooley, Charles Horton

13.

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

14.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

15.

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.

16.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

17.

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

Doren, Carl Van

18.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

19.

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

Benchley, Robert

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Pound, Ezra

23.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

24.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

25.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

26.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

27.

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

Freud, Sigmund

28.

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

Sand, George

29.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

30.

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

Nicolson, Harold

31.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

32.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

36.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

37.

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

Canetti, Elias

38.

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

39.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

40.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

42.

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

43.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

44.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

45.

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

Marx, Groucho

46.

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

Orwell, George

47.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

48.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

49.

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

50.

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

Butler, Samuel