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

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

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

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Thurber, James

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

Russell, Bertrand

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

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

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

10.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

12.

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

Joyce, James

13.

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.

14.

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

Rushdie, Salman

15.

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

Steinbeck, John

16.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

17.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

18.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

19.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

21.

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

22.

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

Nunn, Gregory

23.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

24.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

Benchley, Robert

26.

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

27.

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

Paz, Octavio

28.

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

Freud, Sigmund

29.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

30.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

31.

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

Churchill, Charles

32.

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

33.

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

Steinbeck, John

34.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

35.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

36.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

37.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

39.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

40.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

41.

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

Benchley, Robert

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

45.

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

46.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

47.

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

48.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

49.

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

50.

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

Porter, Cole