Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writers are always selling somebody out.

- Didion, Joan

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

Orwell, George

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

Naipaul, V. S.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

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

10.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

11.

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

Horace

12.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

13.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

14.

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

Freud, Sigmund

15.

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

16.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

17.

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

18.

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

19.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

20.

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

21.

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

Thurber, James

22.

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

Churchill, Charles

23.

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

Bach, Richard

24.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

25.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

26.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

27.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

28.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

32.

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

Pascal, Blaise

33.

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

34.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

35.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

36.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

37.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

38.

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

39.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

40.

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

Woolf, Virginia

41.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

45.

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

Anderson, Margaret

46.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

47.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

48.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

49.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

50.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni