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

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

Pascal, Blaise

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

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

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

Sand, George

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

10.

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

Martin, Judith

11.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

13.

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

14.

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

Collins, Jackie

15.

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

Goodman, Ellen

16.

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

Hellman, Lillian

17.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

20.

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

Thurber, James

21.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

22.

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

Pascal, Blaise

23.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

24.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

25.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

30.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

31.

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

32.

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

33.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

34.

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

35.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

36.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

37.

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

Auden, W. H.

38.

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

39.

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

Churchill, Charles

40.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

41.

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

Faulkner, William

42.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

43.

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

44.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

45.

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

Canetti, Elias

46.

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

Kesey, Ken

47.

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

48.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

49.

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

Baldwin, James

50.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward