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

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

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

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

Pascal, Blaise

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

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

10.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

11.

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

Churchill, Charles

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

15.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

16.

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

Baldwin, James

17.

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

Rushdie, Salman

18.

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

Shaw, Irwin

19.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

20.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

21.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

22.

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

Sontag, Susan

23.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

26.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

27.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

28.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

Martin, Judith

30.

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

31.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

32.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

33.

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

Zinsser, William

34.

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

35.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

36.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

37.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

38.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

39.

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

40.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

41.

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

Rosten, Leo

42.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

43.

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

44.

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

Steinbeck, John

45.

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

46.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

47.

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

Orwell, George

48.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

49.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

50.

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