Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

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

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Doren, Carl Van

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

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

Gribbon, George

10.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

11.

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

12.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

13.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

14.

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

15.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

16.

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

Auden, W. H.

17.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

19.

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

Pascal, Blaise

20.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

21.

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

Benchley, Robert

22.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

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.

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

Pound, Ezra

25.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

26.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

27.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

28.

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.

29.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

30.

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

Burgess, Anthony

31.

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

32.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

33.

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

34.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

36.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Marquis, Don

40.

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

41.

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

Handke, Peter

42.

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

43.

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

Freud, Sigmund

44.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

45.

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

Ellman, Lucy

46.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

47.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

48.

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

Swift, Jonathan

49.

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

50.

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