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

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.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

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.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. 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.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

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

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

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

10.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

11.

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

Bennett, Arnold

12.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

13.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

14.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

15.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

16.

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

17.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Marquis, Don

21.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

Steinbeck, John

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

32.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Orwell, George

39.

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

40.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

41.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

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

Zinsser, William

43.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

44.

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

Handke, Peter

45.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

46.

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

47.

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

Twain, Mark

48.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

49.

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

Faulkner, William

50.

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.