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

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

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

Bennett, Arnold

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

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

Steinbeck, John

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

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

10.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

11.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

12.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

13.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

14.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

15.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

Benchley, Robert

17.

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

18.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

19.

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

Asimov, Isaac

20.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

21.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

22.

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

Kraus, Karl

23.

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

Nunn, Gregory

24.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

25.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

26.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

27.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

28.

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

Miller, Olin

29.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

30.

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

31.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

32.

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

33.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

34.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

35.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

36.

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

Horace

37.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

38.

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

39.

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

Gribbon, George

40.

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

41.

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

Faulkner, William

42.

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

Rushdie, Salman

43.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

44.

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

Steinbeck, John

45.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Vries, Peter De

49.

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

50.

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.