Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

- Faulkner, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

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

Orwell, George

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.

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

Liebling, A. J.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

Sontag, Susan

10.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

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

Kesey, Ken

12.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

Asimov, Isaac

17.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

18.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

19.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

20.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

21.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

23.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

24.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

25.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

26.

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

Butler, Samuel

27.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

31.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

32.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

33.

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

Horace

34.

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

Benchley, Robert

35.

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

Mortimer, John

36.

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

Doren, Carl Van

37.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

38.

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

Joyce, James

39.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

40.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

41.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

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.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

46.

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

Pascal, Blaise

47.

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

48.

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

Handke, Peter

49.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

50.

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

Goodman, Ellen