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

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

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

Raine, Craig

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

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Swift, Jonathan

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

Auden, W. H.

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

10.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

11.

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

Sontag, Susan

12.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

13.

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

14.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

15.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

16.

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

17.

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

Woolf, Virginia

18.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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

20.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

21.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

22.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

23.

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

Marquis, Don

24.

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

Nicolson, Harold

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

27.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

28.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

29.

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

30.

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

Zinsser, William

31.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

32.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

37.

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.

38.

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

Benchley, Robert

39.

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

40.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

41.

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

Vries, Peter De

42.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

43.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

44.

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

Pascal, Blaise

45.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

46.

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

Gribbon, George

47.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

Murdoch, Iris

49.

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

50.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander