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

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

Rushdie, Salman

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

Lawrence, D. H.

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

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

Asimov, Isaac

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Paz, Octavio

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

Gribbon, George

10.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

11.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

12.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

13.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

14.

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

15.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

16.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

17.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

18.

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

19.

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

Hutchens, John K.

20.

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

Hazlitt, William

21.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

22.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

23.

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

24.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

25.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

26.

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

Nicolson, Harold

27.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

28.

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

Duncan, Isadora

29.

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

Steinbeck, John

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Sand, George

33.

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

34.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

35.

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

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

39.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

Joyce, James

41.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

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.

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

44.

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

Rushdie, Salman

45.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

46.

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

47.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

48.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

49.

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

Miller, Olin

50.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.