Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

- Handke, Peter

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Dyer, Wayne

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

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

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

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

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

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

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

Goodman, Ellen

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

Fadiman, Clifton

10.

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.

11.

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

Liebling, A. J.

12.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

13.

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

14.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

15.

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

16.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

17.

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.

18.

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

Steinbeck, John

19.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

23.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

24.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

25.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

26.

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

27.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

28.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

29.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

30.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

31.

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

Hutchens, John K.

32.

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

Kraus, Karl

33.

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

Shaw, Irwin

34.

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

Churchill, Charles

35.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

36.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

37.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

38.

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

39.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

40.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

41.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

42.

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

43.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

44.

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

45.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

46.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

47.

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

48.

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

Wilde, Oscar

49.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

50.

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

Steinem, Gloria