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

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Mortimer, John

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

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

10.

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

Swift, Jonathan

11.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

12.

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

13.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

14.

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

15.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

16.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

17.

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

18.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

19.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

20.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

21.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

22.

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

Pound, Ezra

23.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

24.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

25.

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

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

Butler, Samuel

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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.

31.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

32.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

33.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

34.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

35.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

36.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

37.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

38.

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

Murdoch, Iris

39.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

40.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

41.

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

42.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

Ellman, Lucy

44.

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

45.

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

Faulkner, William

46.

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

47.

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

Rosten, Leo

48.

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

49.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

50.

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

Dyer, Wayne