Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

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

Pound, Ezra

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

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

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

10.

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

Raine, Craig

11.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

12.

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

13.

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

14.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

15.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

16.

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

Kesey, Ken

17.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

18.

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

Collins, Jackie

19.

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

20.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

21.

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

Shaw, Irwin

22.

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

23.

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

Martin, Judith

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Murdoch, Iris

27.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

28.

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

Marx, Groucho

29.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

30.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

31.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

32.

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

33.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

35.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

36.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

37.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

38.

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

Russell, Bertrand

39.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

40.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

41.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

42.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

43.

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

Dennis, Patrick

44.

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

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.

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

Bach, Richard

47.

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

Orwell, George

48.

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

49.

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

Twain, Mark

50.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.