Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

If you wish to be a writer; write!

- Epictetus

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

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

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

Collins, Jackie

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

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

Woolf, Virginia

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

10.

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

Johnson, Samuel

11.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

12.

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

Butler, Samuel

13.

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

14.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

15.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

16.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

17.

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

18.

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

Gribbon, George

19.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

20.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

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

26.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

27.

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

Murdoch, Iris

28.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

30.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

31.

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

Bennett, Arnold

32.

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

Rushdie, Salman

33.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

34.

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

Duncan, Isadora

35.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

36.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

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

38.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

40.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

41.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

42.

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

Mencken, H. L.

43.

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

Kesey, Ken

44.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

45.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

46.

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

Ellman, Lucy

47.

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

Pound, Ezra

48.

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

49.

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

50.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl