Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Ellman, Lucy

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Nunn, Gregory

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Paz, Octavio

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

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

Swift, Jonathan

10.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

11.

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

12.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

13.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

14.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

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

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

18.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

19.

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

20.

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

Hutchens, John K.

21.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

22.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

23.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

28.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

29.

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

Nicolson, Harold

30.

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

31.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

32.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

33.

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

Freud, Sigmund

34.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

35.

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

Vries, Peter De

36.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

37.

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

38.

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

Raine, Craig

39.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

40.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

41.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

45.

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

46.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

47.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.