Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hemingway, Ernest

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

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

Woolf, Virginia

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

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

Freud, Sigmund

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

10.

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

Marquis, Don

11.

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

12.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

14.

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

15.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

17.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

18.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

19.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

20.

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

21.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

22.

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

Handke, Peter

23.

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

24.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

25.

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

26.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

27.

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

Steinbeck, John

28.

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

Gribbon, George

29.

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

30.

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

Steinbeck, John

31.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

32.

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

Pound, Ezra

33.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

34.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

36.

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

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

47.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

48.

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

Faulkner, William

49.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

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