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The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Martin, Judith

10.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

11.

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

Paz, Octavio

12.

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

Doren, Carl Van

13.

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

Nunn, Gregory

14.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

20.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

Kesey, Ken

22.

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

Collins, Jackie

23.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

26.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

27.

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

28.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

31.

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.

32.

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

Mortimer, John

33.

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

Vries, Peter De

34.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

35.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

36.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

38.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

39.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

40.

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

41.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

42.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

43.

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

44.

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

Joyce, James

45.

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

46.

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

47.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

48.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

49.

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

50.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph