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

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

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

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

Raine, Craig

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

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

Landor, Walter Savage

10.

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

11.

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

Woolf, Virginia

12.

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

13.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

14.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

15.

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

Doren, Carl Van

16.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

17.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

18.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

19.

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

Duncan, Isadora

20.

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

21.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

22.

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

Forster, Edward M.

23.

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

24.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

25.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

26.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

27.

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

Kesey, Ken

28.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

29.

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

30.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Burgess, Anthony

34.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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

37.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

38.

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

Benchley, Robert

39.

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

40.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

42.

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

Marquis, Don

43.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

44.

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

Canetti, Elias

45.

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

Vries, Peter De

46.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

49.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

50.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman