Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

- Fowler, Gene

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Zinsser, William

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

Faulkner, William

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

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

Dahlberg, Edward

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

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

10.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

11.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

12.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

13.

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

Duncan, Isadora

14.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

15.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

16.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

17.

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.

18.

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

Liebling, A. J.

19.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

20.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

21.

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.

22.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

23.

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

24.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

25.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

26.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

27.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

28.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

29.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

30.

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

Hellman, Lillian

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.

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

Bach, Richard

33.

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

Kraus, Karl

34.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

35.

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

36.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

37.

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

38.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

39.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Mortimer, John

41.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

43.

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

Burgess, Anthony

44.

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

45.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

46.

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

47.

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

Butler, Samuel

48.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

49.

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

50.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar