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 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

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

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

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

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

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

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

Freud, Sigmund

10.

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

Faulkner, William

11.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

12.

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

Zinsser, William

13.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

14.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

Asimov, Isaac

20.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

21.

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.

22.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

23.

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

24.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

25.

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

26.

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

Murdoch, Iris

27.

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

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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

Baldwin, James

30.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

31.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

32.

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

33.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

34.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

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

Forster, Edward M.

36.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

37.

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

Hutchens, John K.

38.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

39.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

40.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

41.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

42.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

43.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

44.

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

Pascal, Blaise

45.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

50.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril