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

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

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

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

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

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

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

Raine, Craig

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

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

10.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

12.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

13.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

14.

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

Bach, Richard

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.

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

17.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

18.

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

19.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

20.

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

Zinsser, William

21.

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

Doren, Carl Van

22.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

23.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

24.

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

Pound, Ezra

25.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

26.

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

27.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

29.

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

30.

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

Pascal, Blaise

31.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

33.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

34.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

35.

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

Pound, Ezra

36.

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

37.

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

Rushdie, Salman

38.

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

Nicolson, Harold

39.

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

Gribbon, George

40.

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

Swift, Jonathan

41.

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

Woolf, Virginia

42.

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

43.

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

Russell, Bertrand

44.

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

45.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

47.

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.

48.

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.

49.

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

Liebling, A. J.

50.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace