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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

Hemingway, Ernest

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

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

Gribbon, George

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Auden, W. H.

13.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

14.

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

Pascal, Blaise

15.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

16.

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

17.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Shaw, Irwin

21.

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

Kesey, Ken

22.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

23.

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

24.

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

Churchill, Charles

25.

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

Benchley, Robert

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

28.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

29.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

30.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

31.

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

32.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

33.

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

34.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

35.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

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

37.

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

Steinbeck, John

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Orwell, George

41.

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

42.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Joyce, James

46.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

47.

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

Faulkner, William

48.

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

49.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

50.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.