Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

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.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

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

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

Pound, Ezra

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Marquis, Don

10.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

15.

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

16.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

17.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

18.

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

19.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

20.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

21.

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

22.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

23.

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

Kraus, Karl

24.

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

Pound, Ezra

25.

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

26.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

27.

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

28.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

29.

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

30.

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

Woolf, Virginia

31.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

32.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

33.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

34.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

Freud, Sigmund

36.

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

Nunn, Gregory

37.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

38.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

39.

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

Thurber, James

40.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

41.

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

Swift, Jonathan

42.

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

Pascal, Blaise

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.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

45.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

47.

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

Russell, Bertrand

48.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

49.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

50.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia