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

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

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

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

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

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

Collins, Jackie

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

10.

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

11.

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

12.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

13.

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

14.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

15.

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

16.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

17.

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

Zinsser, William

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

21.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

22.

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

Rushdie, Salman

23.

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

Dennis, Patrick

24.

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

25.

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

Swift, Jonathan

26.

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

27.

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

Woolf, Virginia

28.

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

Gribbon, George

29.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

30.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

31.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

32.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

33.

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

Handke, Peter

34.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

35.

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

36.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

37.

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

38.

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

Nunn, Gregory

39.

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

40.

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

Forster, Edward M.

41.

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

Pascal, Blaise

42.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

43.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

44.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

45.

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

Kesey, Ken

46.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

47.

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

48.

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

Thurber, James

49.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

50.

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