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

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Nicolson, Harold

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

10.

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

Steinem, Gloria

11.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

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.

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

Handke, Peter

14.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

19.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

20.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

21.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

22.

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

Marx, Groucho

23.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

24.

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

Canetti, Elias

25.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

26.

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.

27.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

28.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

29.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

30.

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

Horace

31.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

32.

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

Baldwin, James

33.

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

Nunn, Gregory

34.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

35.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

36.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

37.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

38.

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

Porter, Cole

39.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

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

Martin, Judith

41.

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

Swift, Jonathan

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

46.

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

47.

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

Rice, Anne

48.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

49.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert