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

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

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

Hellman, Lillian

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

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

Joyce, James

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

Doren, Carl Van

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

10.

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

11.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

12.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

13.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

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

Butler, Samuel

16.

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

Steinbeck, John

17.

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

Pascal, Blaise

18.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

19.

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

20.

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

21.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

22.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

23.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

24.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

25.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

26.

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

27.

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

Freud, Sigmund

28.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

32.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

33.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

34.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

35.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

36.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

37.

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

Nicolson, Harold

38.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

40.

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

41.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

42.

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

43.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

44.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

45.

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

46.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

47.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

48.

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

Swift, Jonathan

49.

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