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

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

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

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

10.

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

Steinbeck, John

11.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

12.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

13.

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

14.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

15.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

16.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

17.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

22.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

23.

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

Marquis, Don

24.

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

25.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

Auden, W. H.

27.

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

28.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

29.

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

30.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

31.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

Liebling, A. J.

37.

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

38.

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

Raine, Craig

39.

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

40.

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

Canetti, Elias

41.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

42.

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

Freud, Sigmund

43.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

44.

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

Pascal, Blaise

45.

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

Handke, Peter

46.

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

Twain, Mark

47.

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

48.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

49.

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

50.

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