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

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

Baldwin, James

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

Martin, Judith

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

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

10.

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

11.

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

Vries, Peter De

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.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

14.

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

Raine, Craig

15.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

16.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

17.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

18.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

19.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

22.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

23.

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.

24.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

25.

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

26.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

27.

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

Zinsser, William

28.

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.

29.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

30.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

31.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

32.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

33.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

34.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

35.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

36.

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

37.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

38.

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.

39.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

40.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

44.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

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.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

48.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

49.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

50.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William