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 discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

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

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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

Liebling, A. J.

10.

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

Bennett, Arnold

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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

Faulkner, William

13.

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

Rosten, Leo

14.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

15.

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

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

18.

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

19.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

20.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

21.

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

22.

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

Horace

23.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

24.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

25.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

26.

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

27.

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

Mortimer, John

28.

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

29.

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

Vries, Peter De

30.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

32.

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

33.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

34.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

35.

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

Nicolson, Harold

36.

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.

37.

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

Canetti, Elias

38.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

39.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

40.

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

Anderson, Margaret

41.

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

42.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

43.

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

Ferber, Edna

44.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

45.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

46.

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

47.

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

Murdoch, Iris

48.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

49.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

50.

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