Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

- Franklin, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

James, William

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

10.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

12.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

13.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

14.

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

Duncan, Isadora

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Pound, Ezra

18.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

19.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

20.

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.

21.

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

Orwell, George

22.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

23.

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

Faulkner, William

24.

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

Raine, Craig

25.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

26.

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

27.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

28.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

29.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

30.

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.

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Sand, George

35.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

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

37.

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

Gribbon, George

38.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Corbett, James J.

42.

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

43.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

44.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

45.

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

46.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Kesey, Ken

50.

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