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

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

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

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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

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

Asimov, Isaac

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

Doren, Carl Van

10.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

11.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

12.

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

13.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

14.

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

15.

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

Paz, Octavio

16.

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

17.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

18.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

19.

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

Faulkner, William

20.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

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

22.

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

Duncan, Isadora

23.

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

Hutchens, John K.

24.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

25.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

26.

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

Raine, Craig

27.

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

Collins, Jackie

28.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

29.

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

Benchley, Robert

30.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

31.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

32.

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

33.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

34.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

35.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

36.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

37.

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

Pascal, Blaise

38.

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

Burgess, Anthony

39.

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

Kraus, Karl

40.

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

41.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

48.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

49.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

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