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

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

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

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

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

10.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

11.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

12.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

16.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

18.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

19.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

Marx, Groucho

24.

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

25.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

27.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

28.

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.

29.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

30.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

35.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

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

37.

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

Faulkner, William

38.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

39.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

41.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

42.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

43.

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

Forster, Edward M.

44.

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

45.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

46.

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

Bennett, Arnold

47.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

49.

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

50.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.