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

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

Rice, Anne

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

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

Benchley, Robert

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

Landor, Walter Savage

10.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

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.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

17.

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

Doren, Carl Van

18.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

19.

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

20.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

22.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

23.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

24.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

25.

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

26.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

27.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

28.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

29.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

30.

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

31.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

32.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

33.

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

Baldwin, James

34.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

35.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

36.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Burgess, Anthony

41.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

42.

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

43.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

47.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

48.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

49.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.