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
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
You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
Goodman, Ellen
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
If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von
Good writing is clear thinking made visible.
Wheeler, Bill
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Steinem, Gloria
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
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
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
Writing is a craft not an art.
Zinsser, William
Easy writings curse is hard reading.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley
To write is a humiliation.
Dahlberg, Edward
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
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Butler, Samuel
The walls are the publishers of the poor.
Galeano, Eduardo
A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.
Gribbon, George
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.
Handke, Peter
I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.
Vries, Peter De
The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
Benchley, Robert
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
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
Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.
Sollers, Philippe
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.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Hemingway, Ernest
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
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
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
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Hemingway, Ernest
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
Borges, Jorge Luis
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
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
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
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
White, Elwyn Brooks
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
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
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
To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.
Nicolson, Harold
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia
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
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
Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.
Corbett, James J.
Daily Inspirational Quotes on
The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by Motivational Quotes.
Quotes on Ability
Achievement
Acting and actors
Action
Adversity
Quotes on Advertising
Advice
Age
Age and aging
Alcohol and alcoholism
Quotes on Ambition
America
Anger
Animals
Appearance
Quotes on Argument
Art
Atheism
Attitude
Beauty
Quotes on Belief
Body
Books
Books - reading
Bores and boredom
Quotes on Business
Change
Character
Charity
Children
Quotes on Choice
Christians and christianity
Churches
Civilization
Colleges and universities
Quotes on Commitment
Common sense
Communication
Communism and socialism
Competition
Quotes on Complaints and complaining
Computers
Concentration
Confidence
Conflict
Quotes on Contentment
Control
Conversation
Cooperation
Courage
Quotes on Creativity
Crime and criminals
Criticism
Culture
Death
Quotes on Education
Effort
Enemies
Enthusiasm
Equality
Quotes on Evil
Evolution
Example
Excellence
Expectation
Quotes on Experience
Facts
Failure
Faith
Fame
Quotes on Family
Fashion
Fate
Fear
Feminism
Quotes on Fiction
Focus
Food
Food and eating
Fools and foolishness
Quotes on Forgiveness
Freedom
Friends and friendship
Friendship
Genius
Quotes on Giving
Goals
God
Goodness
Gossip
Quotes on Government
Gratitude
Greatness
Grief
Growth
Quotes on Habit
Happiness
Hatred
Health
Heaven
Quotes on Heroes and heroism
History and historians
Hollywood
Home
Honesty
Quotes on Honor
Hope
Humankind
Humility
Humor
Quotes on Ideas
Ignorance
Imagination
Individuality
Integrity
Quotes on Intelligence and intellectuals
Jesus christ
Journalism and journalists
Joy
Judgment and judges
Quotes on Justice
Kindness
Knowledge
Language
Laughter
Quotes on Law and lawyers
Laziness
Leadership
Learning
Liberty
Quotes on Lies and lying
Life
Listening
Literature
Loneliness
Quotes on Losers and losing
Love
Luck
Management
Manners
Quotes on Marriage
Media
Medicine
Memory
Men
Quotes on Mind
Mistakes
Money
Morality
Mothers
Quotes on Motivation
Music
Nations
Nature
Obstacles
Quotes on Opinions
Opportunity
Optimism
Pain
Parents and parenting
Quotes on Passion
Past
Patience
Patriotism
Peace
Quotes on People
Perfection
Perseverance
Persuasion
Philosophers and philosophy
Quotes on Photography
Planning
Pleasure
Poetry and poets
Politics
Quotes on Possibilities
Potential
Poverty and the poor
Power
Praise
Quotes on Prayer
Prejudice
Present
Pride
Problems
Quotes on Procrastination
Progress
Proverbs
Purpose
Quotations
Quotes on Reality
Reason
Relationship
Religion
Reputation
Quotes on Respectability
Responsibility
Riches
Risk
Science
Quotes on Secrets
Security
Self-esteem
Service
Silence
Quotes on Simplicity
Sin
Sleep
Society
Solitude
Quotes on Speakers and speaking
Speech
Spirituality
Success
Suffering
Quotes on Talent
Taxes and taxation
Teacher
The future
Theater
Quotes on Things and little things
Thoughts and thinking
Time
Travel
Trust
Quotes on Truth
Twentieth century
Understanding
Victory
Virtue
Quotes on Vision
War
Wealth
Winners and winning
Wisdom
Quotes on Wives
Women
Words
Work
World
Quotes on Worry
Writers and writing
Writing
Youth
Test your English Language
Men Like in Women
Valentine Day Cards
Precautions while using UPS
Weird Laws Around the World
Benefits of Capers
New Year Party Game Ideas
New Year Poems
New Year Wishes



