Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Duncan, Isadora

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Rice, Anne

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Zinsser, William

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

Zinsser, William

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

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

10.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

15.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

16.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

17.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

18.

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

19.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

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.

21.

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.

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

Zinsser, William

24.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

26.

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

27.

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

Pascal, Blaise

28.

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

Bennett, Arnold

29.

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

Kraus, Karl

30.

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

31.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

32.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

Martin, Judith

34.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

35.

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

36.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

37.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

38.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

40.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

41.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

42.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

Gribbon, George

44.

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

Steinbeck, John

45.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

46.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

47.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Pound, Ezra