Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

- Havel, Vaclav

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

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

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

Raine, Craig

10.

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

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.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

13.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

14.

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

Wilde, Oscar

15.

Havel, Vaclav

16.

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

17.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

18.

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

Bennett, Arnold

19.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

20.

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

Goodman, Ellen

21.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

22.

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

Burgess, Anthony

23.

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

24.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

25.

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

26.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

27.

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

28.

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

Sand, George

29.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

Steinbeck, John

32.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

33.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

34.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

35.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

36.

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.

37.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

38.

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.

39.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

40.

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

Johnson, Samuel

41.

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

Nicolson, Harold

42.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

43.

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

Nunn, Gregory

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Dyer, Wayne

48.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

49.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

50.

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