Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

- Crowley, Aleister

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

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

Liebling, A. J.

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

Hutchens, John K.

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

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

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

11.

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

12.

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

Shaw, Irwin

13.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

14.

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

Swift, Jonathan

15.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

19.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

21.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

22.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

23.

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

Asimov, Isaac

24.

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

Benchley, Robert

25.

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

Joyce, James

26.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

27.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

29.

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

Steinbeck, John

30.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

31.

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

Bach, Richard

32.

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

Faulkner, William

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

Marquis, Don

36.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

37.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

38.

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

Rushdie, Salman

39.

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

Pascal, Blaise

40.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

41.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

42.

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

43.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

44.

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

45.

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

Zinsser, William

46.

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

47.

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

Steinbeck, John

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Hemingway, Ernest