Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Handke, Peter

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

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

Hutchens, John K.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

Ferber, Edna

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

10.

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

11.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

12.

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

Thurber, James

13.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

14.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

15.

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

Nunn, Gregory

16.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

17.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

18.

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

Swift, Jonathan

19.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

20.

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

Orwell, George

21.

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

22.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

23.

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

Zinsser, William

24.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

25.

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

26.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

27.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

29.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

30.

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

31.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

Duncan, Isadora

34.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

36.

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

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

39.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Zinsser, William

44.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

45.

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

Pascal, Blaise

46.

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

47.

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

Sontag, Susan

48.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

49.

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

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