Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Faulkner, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

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

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

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 necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Nicolson, Harold

13.

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

14.

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

Collins, Jackie

15.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

16.

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

17.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

18.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

19.

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

Duncan, Isadora

20.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

21.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

22.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

23.

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

24.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

25.

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

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

28.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

29.

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

Pascal, Blaise

30.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

31.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

32.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

34.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

36.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

37.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

38.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

39.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

40.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

41.

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

Zinsser, William

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

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

Russell, Bertrand

47.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

48.

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

Shaw, Irwin

49.

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

50.

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.