Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

- Franklin, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

10.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

11.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

12.

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

13.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

14.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

15.

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

16.

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

Benchley, Robert

17.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

18.

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

Bennett, Arnold

19.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

20.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

21.

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

22.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

23.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

24.

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

Baldwin, James

25.

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

Rushdie, Salman

26.

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

Faulkner, William

27.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

28.

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.

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

Canetti, Elias

31.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

32.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

33.

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

34.

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

Liebling, A. J.

35.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

36.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

37.

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

Ellman, Lucy

38.

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

39.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

40.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

43.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

44.

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

Pascal, Blaise

45.

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

46.

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

Mortimer, John

47.

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

Handke, Peter

48.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

49.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

50.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston