Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Dyer, Wayne

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

Pound, Ezra

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

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

Anderson, Margaret

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

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

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

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

10.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

11.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

12.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

13.

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

Joyce, James

14.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

18.

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

19.

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

Gribbon, George

20.

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

Corbett, James J.

21.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

22.

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

Benchley, Robert

23.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

27.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

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

29.

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

Woolf, Virginia

30.

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

Baldwin, James

31.

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

32.

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

Shaw, Irwin

33.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

34.

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

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

Rosten, Leo

37.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

40.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

41.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

45.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

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

Pascal, Blaise

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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