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

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

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

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

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

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

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

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.

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

Swift, Jonathan

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

10.

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

11.

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

12.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

13.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

14.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

15.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

16.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

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

Churchill, Charles

18.

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

19.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

20.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

21.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

Baldwin, James

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Nunn, Gregory

29.

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

Shaw, Irwin

30.

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

Steinbeck, John

31.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

32.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

33.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

34.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

35.

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

Freud, Sigmund

36.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

37.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

38.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

39.

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

40.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

42.

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

43.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

44.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

45.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

47.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

48.

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

49.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

50.

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