Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Sand, George

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

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

Gribbon, George

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Kesey, Ken

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

Hazlitt, William

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

10.

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

Forster, Edward M.

11.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

15.

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

16.

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

Hutchens, John K.

17.

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

18.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

19.

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

20.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

Joyce, James

22.

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

23.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

25.

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

Benchley, Robert

26.

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

27.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

28.

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

29.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

30.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

31.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

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

34.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

35.

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

36.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

37.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

38.

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

Woolf, Virginia

39.

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

40.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

43.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

44.

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

Asimov, Isaac

45.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

46.

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

Mencken, H. L.

47.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

48.

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.

49.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

50.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony