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

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

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

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

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

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

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

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

Mortimer, John

10.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

11.

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.

12.

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

Rushdie, Salman

13.

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

Murdoch, Iris

14.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

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

16.

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

Dennis, Patrick

17.

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

Handke, Peter

18.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

19.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

20.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

21.

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

Pascal, Blaise

22.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

23.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

24.

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

25.

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

Marquis, Don

26.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

30.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

31.

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

Steinbeck, John

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

37.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

38.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

39.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

40.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

41.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

42.

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

Ferber, Edna

43.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

44.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

46.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Doren, Carl Van

50.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks