Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

- Freud, Sigmund

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

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

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

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

Liebling, A. J.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

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

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

10.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

11.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

18.

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

19.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

20.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

21.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

22.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

23.

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

24.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

25.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

26.

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

Benchley, Robert

27.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

28.

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

29.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Rushdie, Salman

35.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

36.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

37.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

38.

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

Hellman, Lillian

39.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

40.

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

41.

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

Zinsser, William

42.

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

43.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

44.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

45.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

46.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

47.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Doren, Carl Van