Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

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

Johnson, Samuel

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

Kesey, Ken

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Naipaul, V. S.

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

Ellman, Lucy

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

10.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

11.

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

12.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

13.

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

Pascal, Blaise

14.

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

Doren, Carl Van

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

18.

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

19.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

20.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

21.

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

22.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

24.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

25.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

26.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

27.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

28.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

Hellman, Lillian

31.

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.

32.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

33.

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

34.

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

Steinbeck, John

35.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

36.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

37.

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

Thurber, James

38.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

39.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

40.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

41.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

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

Nicolson, Harold

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Steinem, Gloria

49.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

50.

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