Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Corbett, James J.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Paz, Octavio

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

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

Nunn, Gregory

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

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

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Kraus, Karl

10.

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

11.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

12.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

13.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

14.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

15.

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

16.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

17.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

18.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

19.

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

Steinbeck, John

20.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

21.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

Duncan, Isadora

24.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

25.

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

Rice, Anne

26.

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

27.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

28.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

29.

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

30.

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

Corbett, James J.

31.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

32.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

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.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

36.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

37.

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

Rosten, Leo

38.

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

39.

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

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

41.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

42.

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

Benchley, Robert

43.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

44.

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

Gribbon, George

45.

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

Nicolson, Harold

46.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

47.

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

48.

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

Raine, Craig

49.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

50.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset