Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Faulkner, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

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

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

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

Faulkner, William

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

10.

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

Goodman, Ellen

11.

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

Pound, Ezra

12.

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

Vries, Peter De

13.

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

Zinsser, William

14.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

15.

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

Swift, Jonathan

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Pascal, Blaise

19.

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

Doren, Carl Van

20.

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

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

27.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

28.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

29.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

30.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

31.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

32.

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

Mortimer, John

33.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

34.

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

35.

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

Collins, Jackie

36.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

37.

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

38.

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

Hellman, Lillian

39.

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

40.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

41.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

42.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

43.

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

Joyce, James

44.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

45.

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

46.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

47.

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

48.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

49.

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

50.

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

Steinbeck, John