Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Marquis, Don

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

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

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

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

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

11.

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.

12.

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

James, William

13.

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

Raine, Craig

14.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

15.

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

Woolf, Virginia

16.

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

17.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

18.

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

Steinbeck, John

19.

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

20.

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

Hazlitt, William

21.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

22.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

23.

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

Pascal, Blaise

24.

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

25.

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

Duncan, Isadora

26.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

27.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

28.

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

29.

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

Faulkner, William

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

33.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

34.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

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

Mortimer, John

36.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

37.

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

38.

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

Paz, Octavio

39.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

40.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

41.

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

42.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

43.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Orwell, George

48.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

49.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

50.

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