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

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

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.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

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

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

Asimov, Isaac

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

Horace

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

10.

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

Burgess, Anthony

11.

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

Freud, Sigmund

12.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

13.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

14.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

15.

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

16.

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

Steinem, Gloria

17.

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

Raine, Craig

18.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

19.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

20.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

21.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

22.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

23.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

24.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

25.

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

26.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

28.

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

29.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

30.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

31.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

38.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

40.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

41.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

44.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

45.

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

Anderson, Margaret

46.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

47.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

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

49.

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

50.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo