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

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

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

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Hemingway, Ernest

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

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

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

Horace

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

10.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

11.

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

Ellman, Lucy

12.

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

Steinbeck, John

13.

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

Hellman, Lillian

14.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

15.

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

16.

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

Nunn, Gregory

17.

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

18.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

19.

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

20.

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

Churchill, Charles

21.

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

Rosten, Leo

22.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

23.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

24.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

25.

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

Hutchens, John K.

26.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

27.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

28.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

30.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

31.

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

32.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

33.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

38.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

39.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

40.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

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

Marx, Groucho

42.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

43.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

44.

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

Thurber, James

45.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

46.

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

Kraus, Karl

47.

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

48.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

49.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

50.

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