Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Forster, Edward M.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

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

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

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

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.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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

Naipaul, V. S.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

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

10.

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

11.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

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

Thurber, James

16.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

17.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

18.

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

Orwell, George

19.

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

Benchley, Robert

20.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

21.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

22.

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

23.

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

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

25.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

26.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

27.

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

28.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

29.

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

30.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

32.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

33.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Gribbon, George

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

39.

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

40.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

41.

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

Duncan, Isadora

42.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

43.

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

44.

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

Ellman, Lucy

45.

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

46.

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

Horace

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Nicolson, Harold