Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Dahlberg, Edward

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

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

Porter, Cole

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

Shaw, Irwin

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

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Benchley, Robert

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

Pascal, Blaise

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

13.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

14.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

15.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

16.

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

17.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

18.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

19.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

20.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

21.

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

Hellman, Lillian

22.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

23.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

24.

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

25.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

26.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

27.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

28.

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

29.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

30.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

31.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

32.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

33.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

34.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

35.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

36.

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

37.

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

Marquis, Don

38.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

40.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

41.

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

42.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

43.

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

Butler, Samuel

44.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

45.

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

Doren, Carl Van

46.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

47.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

48.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

49.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

50.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.