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

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

Martin, Judith

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

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

Rushdie, Salman

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

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

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

Bach, Richard

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

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

Hellman, Lillian

10.

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

Sand, George

11.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

12.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

13.

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

14.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

15.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

16.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

17.

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

Freud, Sigmund

18.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

19.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

20.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

21.

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

Benchley, Robert

22.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

23.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

24.

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

25.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

26.

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

Handke, Peter

27.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

28.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

29.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

30.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

31.

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.

32.

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

Thurber, James

33.

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

34.

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

35.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

36.

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

37.

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

Nicolson, Harold

38.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

39.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

40.

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

Pound, Ezra

41.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

42.

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

43.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

44.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

45.

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

46.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

47.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

48.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

49.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

50.

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.