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

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

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

Nicolson, Harold

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

10.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

11.

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

12.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

13.

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.

14.

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

Kraus, Karl

15.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

16.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

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

18.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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.

20.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

21.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

23.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

24.

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

Duncan, Isadora

25.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

26.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

27.

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

28.

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

Miller, Olin

29.

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

Handke, Peter

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.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

32.

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

33.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

34.

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

35.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

36.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

37.

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

38.

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

Steinbeck, John

39.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

40.

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

Pound, Ezra

41.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

42.

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

43.

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

Benchley, Robert

44.

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

45.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

46.

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

47.

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

Corbett, James J.

48.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

49.

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

50.

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

Porter, Cole