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

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

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

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

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

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

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

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

Steinbeck, John

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

10.

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

11.

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

Marquis, Don

12.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

13.

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

Pound, Ezra

14.

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

Churchill, Charles

15.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

16.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

17.

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

Anderson, Margaret

18.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

19.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

20.

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

21.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

26.

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

Steinbeck, John

27.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

30.

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

Shaw, Irwin

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

33.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

34.

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

Benchley, Robert

35.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

36.

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.

37.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

38.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

39.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

40.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

41.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

42.

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

43.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

45.

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

Duncan, Isadora

46.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

47.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

48.

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

Sontag, Susan

49.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

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

Pound, Ezra