Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

- Hazlitt, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

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

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

Steinbeck, John

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

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Dyer, Wayne

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

Baldwin, James

10.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

11.

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

Nunn, Gregory

12.

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

13.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

14.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

15.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

18.

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

Pascal, Blaise

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Zinsser, William

22.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

23.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

24.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

25.

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

Swift, Jonathan

26.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

27.

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

28.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

29.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

30.

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

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Sontag, Susan

33.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

34.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

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

Porter, Cole

36.

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

Joyce, James

37.

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

38.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

39.

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

Steinem, Gloria

40.

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

41.

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

Byron, Lord

42.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

43.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

44.

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

Handke, Peter

45.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne