Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

Canetti, Elias

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

Ferber, Edna

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

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

Marquis, Don

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

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

10.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

12.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

13.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

14.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

15.

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

16.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

17.

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

18.

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

Mortimer, John

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Pascal, Blaise

22.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

23.

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

Goodman, Ellen

24.

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

Nicolson, Harold

25.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

27.

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

28.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

29.

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

30.

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

31.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

32.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

Kraus, Karl

35.

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.

36.

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

Hutchens, John K.

37.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

38.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

39.

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

Freud, Sigmund

40.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

41.

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

Rosten, Leo

42.

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

Mencken, H. L.

43.

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

44.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

45.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

46.

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

47.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

48.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

49.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

50.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita