Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Gribbon, George

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

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

Marx, Groucho

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

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

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

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

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

10.

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

Butler, Samuel

11.

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

Pound, Ezra

12.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

13.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

14.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

15.

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

16.

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

Baldwin, James

17.

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

18.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

19.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

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.

21.

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

Hazlitt, William

22.

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

23.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

27.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

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.

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

30.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

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.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

33.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

34.

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

35.

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

Freud, Sigmund

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

39.

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

Liebling, A. J.

40.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

42.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

43.

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

Faulkner, William

44.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

45.

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

46.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

47.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

48.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

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.

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