Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

To write is a humiliation.

- Dahlberg, Edward

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

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

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

Faulkner, William

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

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

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

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

10.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

11.

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

Goodman, Ellen

12.

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

13.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

15.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

20.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

21.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

23.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

24.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

25.

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

Gribbon, George

26.

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

Handke, Peter

27.

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

Vries, Peter De

28.

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

Benchley, Robert

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

32.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

35.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

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.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

39.

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

40.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

41.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

42.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

43.

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

44.

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

45.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

46.

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

Nicolson, Harold

47.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

48.

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

49.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

50.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.