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The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

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

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

Zinsser, William

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

10.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

11.

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

12.

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

Martin, Judith

13.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

14.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

22.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

23.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

24.

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

Twain, Mark

25.

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

Faulkner, William

26.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

27.

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

Johnson, Samuel

28.

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

29.

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

Steinbeck, John

30.

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

Duncan, Isadora

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

33.

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

34.

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

Mortimer, John

35.

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

Freud, Sigmund

36.

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

Doren, Carl Van

37.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

39.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

48.

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

Rosten, Leo

49.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

50.

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