Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Doren, Carl Van

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

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

Steinbeck, John

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

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

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

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

Faulkner, William

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

10.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

11.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

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

16.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

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

Swift, Jonathan

18.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

19.

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

Martin, Judith

20.

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

21.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

22.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

23.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

24.

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

25.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Miller, Olin

31.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

34.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

35.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

36.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

37.

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

Auden, W. H.

38.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

44.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

45.

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

Pound, Ezra

46.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

47.

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

48.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

49.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

50.

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