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

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

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

Naipaul, V. S.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

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

Churchill, Charles

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

Rice, Anne

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

Lawrence, D. H.

10.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

11.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

12.

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

13.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

14.

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

15.

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

Dennis, Patrick

16.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

17.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

18.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

19.

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

Forster, Edward M.

20.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

21.

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

22.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

23.

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

Handke, Peter

24.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

25.

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

Dyer, Wayne

26.

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

Martin, Judith

27.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

30.

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

Rushdie, Salman

31.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

32.

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

33.

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

Murdoch, Iris

34.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

35.

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

Rushdie, Salman

36.

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

Marx, Groucho

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

40.

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

Butler, Samuel

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Duncan, Isadora

44.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

45.

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

46.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

47.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

48.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

49.

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

Steinem, Gloria

50.

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