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

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

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

Churchill, Charles

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

10.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

11.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

12.

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

Corbett, James J.

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

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

15.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

16.

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

Shaw, Irwin

17.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

18.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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.

20.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

21.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

22.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

23.

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

24.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

25.

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

26.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

27.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

28.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

29.

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

Baldwin, James

30.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

31.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

32.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

36.

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

Sand, George

37.

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

Mencken, H. L.

38.

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

39.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

40.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

41.

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.

42.

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

Nunn, Gregory

43.

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

Rushdie, Salman

44.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

45.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

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

Woolf, Virginia

47.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

48.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

49.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

50.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William