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

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

Zinsser, William

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Joyce, James

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

Canetti, Elias

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

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

Burgess, Anthony

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

10.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

11.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

12.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

13.

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

14.

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

Steinem, Gloria

15.

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

16.

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

17.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

18.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

19.

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

Horace

20.

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

21.

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

Baldwin, James

22.

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

23.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

24.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

25.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

26.

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

Asimov, Isaac

27.

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

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

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

30.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

31.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

32.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

33.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

34.

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

35.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

36.

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

37.

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

Duncan, Isadora

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Sand, George

41.

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

42.

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

Pound, Ezra

43.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset