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

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

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

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

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

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

Swift, Jonathan

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

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

10.

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

Bach, Richard

11.

Crisp, Quentin

12.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

13.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

14.

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

15.

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

Churchill, Charles

16.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

17.

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

Steinbeck, John

18.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

19.

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

20.

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

Ellman, Lucy

21.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

22.

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

23.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

Shaw, Irwin

28.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

29.

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

Sand, George

30.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

31.

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

32.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

33.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

Benchley, Robert

37.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

38.

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

39.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

40.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

41.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

42.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

43.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

44.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

45.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William