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

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

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Pascal, Blaise

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

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

Nunn, Gregory

10.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

11.

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

Marquis, Don

12.

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

13.

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

Pound, Ezra

14.

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

15.

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

Woolf, Virginia

16.

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

Paz, Octavio

17.

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

Swift, Jonathan

18.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

19.

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

Byron, Lord

20.

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

21.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

22.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

23.

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

24.

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

25.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

26.

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

Faulkner, William

27.

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.

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

Johnson, Samuel

30.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

31.

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

32.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

33.

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

34.

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

35.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

36.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

37.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

38.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

39.

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

40.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

41.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

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

43.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

45.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

49.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

50.

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