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

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

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

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

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

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

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

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.

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

11.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

12.

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

Johnson, Samuel

13.

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

14.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

15.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

17.

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

Zinsser, William

18.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

19.

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

James, William

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

23.

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

Zinsser, William

24.

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

25.

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

Faulkner, William

26.

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

27.

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

Rice, Anne

28.

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.

29.

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

Raine, Craig

30.

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

Marquis, Don

31.

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

Faulkner, William

32.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

33.

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

34.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

35.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

36.

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

Kraus, Karl

37.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

38.

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

Nunn, Gregory

39.

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

Faulkner, William

40.

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

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

44.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

45.

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

Pascal, Blaise

46.

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

Hemingway, Ernest