Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Goodman, Ellen

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

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

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

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

Duncan, Isadora

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

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

10.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

11.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

15.

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

16.

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

Pound, Ezra

17.

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

Raine, Craig

18.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

19.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

24.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

25.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

26.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

27.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

28.

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

Thurber, James

29.

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

Canetti, Elias

30.

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

31.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

32.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

Sand, George

34.

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

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

37.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

38.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

40.

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

Zinsser, William

41.

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

42.

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

Woolf, Virginia

43.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

44.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

45.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

46.

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

Horace

47.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

48.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

49.

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

50.

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