Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

- Fadiman, Clifton

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

10.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

11.

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

Porter, Cole

12.

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

13.

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

Faulkner, William

14.

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

15.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

19.

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

Twain, Mark

20.

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

21.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

22.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

23.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

24.

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

Pound, Ezra

25.

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

Baldwin, James

26.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

28.

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

29.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

31.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

37.

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

38.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

39.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

40.

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

41.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

42.

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

Duncan, Isadora

43.

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

44.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

45.

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

46.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

47.

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

48.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

49.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

50.

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

Thurber, James