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 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

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

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.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Twain, Mark

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

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

Doren, Carl Van

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

Shaw, Irwin

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

10.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

11.

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

Zinsser, William

12.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

13.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

14.

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

15.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

16.

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

Dennis, Patrick

17.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

18.

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

19.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

20.

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

21.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

22.

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

Bach, Richard

23.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

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.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

26.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

27.

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

28.

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

Steinem, Gloria

29.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

30.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

31.

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

32.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

33.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

34.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

35.

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

36.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

37.

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

Handke, Peter

38.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

39.

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

Steinbeck, John

40.

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

41.

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

Zinsser, William

42.

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

43.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

44.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

45.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

46.

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.

47.

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

Vries, Peter De

48.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

50.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks