Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

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

Miller, Olin

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

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

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

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

10.

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

Butler, Samuel

11.

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

12.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

14.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

15.

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

Hellman, Lillian

16.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

Steinbeck, John

20.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

21.

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

Pascal, Blaise

22.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

23.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

24.

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

Zinsser, William

25.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

26.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

27.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

28.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

29.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

30.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

31.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

32.

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

33.

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

Murdoch, Iris

34.

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

Marx, Groucho

35.

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

Russell, Bertrand

36.

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

Liebling, A. J.

37.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

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

Orwell, George

39.

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

40.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

41.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

45.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

46.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

47.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

48.

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

49.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

50.

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