Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

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

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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.

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

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

10.

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.

11.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

12.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

13.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

14.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

15.

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

16.

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

Vries, Peter De

17.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

19.

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

Kraus, Karl

20.

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

Orwell, George

21.

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

Pound, Ezra

22.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

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

24.

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

Hazlitt, William

25.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

26.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

27.

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

28.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

29.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

30.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

31.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

32.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

34.

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

Bach, Richard

35.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

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

37.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

38.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

39.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

40.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

41.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

42.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

43.

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

Porter, Cole

44.

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

Dyer, Wayne

45.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

49.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

50.

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

Joyce, James