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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Hellman, Lillian

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

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

Marx, Groucho

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

Dennis, Patrick

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

Hazlitt, William

10.

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

11.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

12.

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

13.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

14.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

15.

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

16.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

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

18.

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

Benchley, Robert

19.

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

Handke, Peter

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

25.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

26.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

27.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

28.

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

Freud, Sigmund

29.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

30.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

31.

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

Burgess, Anthony

32.

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

33.

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

Bennett, Arnold

34.

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.

35.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

36.

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

37.

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

Pascal, Blaise

38.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

39.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

41.

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

Joyce, James

42.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

43.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

44.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

45.

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

46.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

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

Churchill, Charles

48.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

49.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

50.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo