Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

If you wish to be a writer; write!

- Epictetus

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Ellman, Lucy

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

Steinbeck, John

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

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

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

Pound, Ezra

11.

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

Dyer, Wayne

12.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

14.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

15.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

16.

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

17.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

18.

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

19.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

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

21.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

22.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

23.

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

Canetti, Elias

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.

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

26.

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

27.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

28.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

29.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

30.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

31.

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

Steinbeck, John

32.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

33.

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

34.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

35.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

36.

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

Marquis, Don

37.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

38.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

39.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

40.

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

Russell, Bertrand

41.

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

42.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

43.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

44.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

49.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

50.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita