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

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

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

Canetti, Elias

10.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

16.

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

17.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

18.

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

Freud, Sigmund

19.

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

20.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

21.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

22.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

23.

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

24.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

25.

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

Baldwin, James

26.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

27.

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

Byron, Lord

28.

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

Doren, Carl Van

29.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

31.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

32.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

33.

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

Corbett, James J.

34.

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.

35.

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

Horace

36.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

37.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

38.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

39.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Steinem, Gloria

43.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

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

Orwell, George

45.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

46.

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

Dyer, Wayne

47.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

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

Nicolson, Harold

49.

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

Woolf, Virginia

50.

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