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

Canetti, Elias

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.

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

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

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

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

10.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

11.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

12.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

13.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

14.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

15.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

16.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

17.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

18.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

19.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

23.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

24.

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

Nicolson, Harold

25.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

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

Hutchens, John K.

27.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

28.

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

29.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

34.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

35.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

37.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

38.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

39.

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

40.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

41.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

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

43.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

44.

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

Bach, Richard

45.

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

Baldwin, James

46.

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

47.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

48.

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

49.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar