Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

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

Rushdie, Salman

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

Martin, Judith

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

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

Horace

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

10.

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

11.

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

Woolf, Virginia

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

14.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

15.

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

16.

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

Marx, Groucho

17.

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

18.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

20.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

21.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

22.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

23.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

25.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

26.

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.

27.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

29.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

30.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

31.

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

32.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

33.

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

Butler, Samuel

34.

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

James, William

35.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

36.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

37.

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

38.

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

Collins, Jackie

39.

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

Byron, Lord

40.

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

Twain, Mark

41.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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

Rushdie, Salman

46.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

47.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

48.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

49.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

50.

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

Steinem, Gloria