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

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

Liebling, A. J.

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

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Anderson, Margaret

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

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

Miller, Olin

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

10.

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

11.

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

Rosten, Leo

12.

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

13.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

14.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

18.

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

Kraus, Karl

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

23.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

24.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

25.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

26.

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

27.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

28.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

32.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

33.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

34.

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

Freud, Sigmund

35.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

36.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

37.

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

Swift, Jonathan

38.

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

Duncan, Isadora

39.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

40.

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

41.

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

Johnson, Samuel

42.

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

James, William

43.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

44.

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

45.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

46.

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

Handke, Peter

47.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

48.

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

Butler, Samuel

49.

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

50.

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