Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Hellman, Lillian

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Mortimer, John

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

Horace

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

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

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

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

Pound, Ezra

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Hazlitt, William

13.

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

14.

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

Bennett, Arnold

15.

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

16.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

17.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

18.

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

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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

Russell, Bertrand

20.

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

Hellman, Lillian

21.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

22.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

23.

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

24.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

25.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

28.

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

29.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

32.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

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

34.

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

Nunn, Gregory

35.

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

Ellman, Lucy

36.

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

37.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

38.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

39.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

42.

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

Duncan, Isadora

43.

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

Nicolson, Harold

44.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

45.

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

Porter, Cole

46.

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

47.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

48.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

49.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

50.

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