Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Benchley, Robert

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

10.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

12.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

13.

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

Kesey, Ken

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

19.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

23.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

24.

Crisp, Quentin

25.

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

26.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

27.

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

Asimov, Isaac

28.

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

Hutchens, John K.

29.

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

30.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

31.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

32.

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

Joyce, James

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.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

38.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

39.

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

40.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

41.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

42.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

43.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

44.

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

Freud, Sigmund

45.

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

Goodman, Ellen

46.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

47.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

48.

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

49.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

50.

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

Shaw, Irwin