Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

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

Rosten, Leo

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

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

Boileau, Nicholas

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

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

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

Goodman, Ellen

10.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

11.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

12.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

13.

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

14.

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

Liebling, A. J.

15.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

Anderson, Margaret

19.

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

Horace

20.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

21.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

22.

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

23.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

24.

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

25.

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

Murdoch, Iris

26.

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

Asimov, Isaac

27.

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

28.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

29.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

30.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

31.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

32.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Vries, Peter De

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

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

40.

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

Butler, Samuel

41.

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

42.

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

43.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

44.

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

Miller, Olin

45.

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

Orwell, George

46.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

47.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

48.

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

Nicolson, Harold

49.

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

50.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra