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

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

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

Kesey, Ken

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Doren, Carl Van

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

10.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

11.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

12.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

16.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

17.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

25.

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

Vries, Peter De

26.

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

Swift, Jonathan

27.

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

Martin, Judith

28.

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.

29.

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

Rosten, Leo

30.

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

31.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

32.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

33.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

34.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

35.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

36.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

37.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

38.

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

39.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

40.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

41.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

Thurber, James

43.

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

Gribbon, George

44.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

45.

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

Rushdie, Salman

46.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

47.

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

Thurber, James

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Faulkner, William