Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

- Dyer, Wayne

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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

Butler, Samuel

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Pound, Ezra

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

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

Auden, W. H.

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

10.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

11.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

12.

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

13.

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

Benchley, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

20.

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

21.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

22.

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.

23.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

24.

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

25.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

26.

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

27.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

28.

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

29.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

30.

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

31.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

32.

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

Pascal, Blaise

33.

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

Rushdie, Salman

34.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

35.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

36.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

37.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Rice, Anne

41.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

42.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

43.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

44.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

45.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

Orwell, George

47.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

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

49.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

50.

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

Bach, Richard