Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Boileau, Nicholas

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

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

Churchill, Charles

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

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

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

Liebling, A. J.

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

Baldwin, James

10.

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

11.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

15.

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

Raine, Craig

16.

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

17.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

18.

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

Bennett, Arnold

19.

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

20.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

21.

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

Pound, Ezra

22.

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

Kesey, Ken

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Hellman, Lillian

26.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Duncan, Isadora

30.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

31.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

32.

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

33.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

34.

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

Steinbeck, John

35.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

36.

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

Bach, Richard

37.

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

Johnson, Samuel

38.

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

39.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

40.

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

41.

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

Russell, Bertrand

42.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

43.

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

Canetti, Elias

44.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

45.

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

46.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

47.

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

48.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

49.

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

50.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars