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

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

Sontag, Susan

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

Paz, Octavio

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Fadiman, Clifton

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

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

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

10.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

11.

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

Porter, Cole

12.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

13.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

14.

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

15.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

16.

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

Pascal, Blaise

17.

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

Zinsser, William

18.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

19.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

20.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

21.

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

Nunn, Gregory

22.

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

23.

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

Pascal, Blaise

24.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

25.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

26.

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

27.

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

Steinbeck, John

28.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

29.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

31.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

32.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

33.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

34.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

35.

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

Kraus, Karl

36.

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

Hazlitt, William

37.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

38.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

39.

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

40.

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

Freud, Sigmund

41.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

42.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

43.

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

Gribbon, George

44.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

45.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

46.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

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

Doren, Carl Van

49.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

50.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice