Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

- Dennis, Patrick

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

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

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

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

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

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

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

14.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

15.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

20.

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

21.

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

Paz, Octavio

22.

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

23.

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

Steinem, Gloria

24.

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

25.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

26.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

28.

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

29.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

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

Horace

31.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

32.

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.

33.

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.

34.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

35.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

36.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

37.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

38.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

39.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

40.

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

41.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

42.

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

Marquis, Don

43.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

44.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

50.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall