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

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

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

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

Russell, Bertrand

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

Freud, Sigmund

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

Fadiman, Clifton

10.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

11.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

13.

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

14.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

15.

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

Rushdie, Salman

16.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

17.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

18.

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

Sontag, Susan

19.

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

20.

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

Auden, W. H.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

25.

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

Burgess, Anthony

26.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

27.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

28.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

29.

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

30.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

31.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

32.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

33.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Zinsser, William

37.

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

Sand, George

38.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

39.

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.

40.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

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

Zinsser, William

42.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

43.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

44.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

45.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

46.

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

Steinbeck, John