Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Handke, Peter

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Ferber, Edna

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

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

Miller, Olin

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

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

Dennis, Patrick

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

Pound, Ezra

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.

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

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

Canetti, Elias

15.

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

16.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

17.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

Freud, Sigmund

19.

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

Baldwin, James

20.

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

21.

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

Woolf, Virginia

22.

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

Thurber, James

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

26.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

27.

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

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

30.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

31.

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

Corbett, James J.

32.

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

33.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

34.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

35.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

36.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

37.

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

Steinbeck, John

38.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

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

Steinem, Gloria

40.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Orwell, George

44.

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

45.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

46.

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

47.

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

Steinbeck, John

48.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

49.

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

50.

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