Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

- Donleavy, J. P.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

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

Vries, Peter De

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

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

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

Rushdie, Salman

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

10.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

11.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

12.

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

13.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

14.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

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

16.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

17.

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

Handke, Peter

18.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

19.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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.

23.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

24.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

25.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

26.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

27.

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.

28.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

29.

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

30.

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

Bennett, Arnold

31.

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.

32.

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

Dyer, Wayne

33.

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

34.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

36.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

37.

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

38.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

39.

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

Baldwin, James

40.

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

41.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

42.

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

Steinbeck, John

43.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

44.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

45.

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

46.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

47.

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

Doren, Carl Van

48.

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

Martin, Judith

49.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

50.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton