Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

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

Sand, George

10.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

11.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

12.

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

Marquis, Don

13.

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

14.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

15.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

16.

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

Gribbon, George

17.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

19.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

20.

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

Steinem, Gloria

21.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

22.

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

Churchill, Charles

23.

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

Shaw, Irwin

24.

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

Steinbeck, John

25.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

Swift, Jonathan

27.

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

Joyce, James

28.

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

29.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

30.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

31.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

32.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

33.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

34.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

Asimov, Isaac

36.

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

37.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

38.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

39.

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

40.

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

Liebling, A. J.

41.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

42.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

43.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

44.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

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.

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.

47.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

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

Corbett, James J.

49.

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

Zinsser, William

50.

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