Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Baldwin, James

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

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

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

Zinsser, William

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

Hazlitt, William

10.

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

11.

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

Porter, Cole

12.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

18.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

19.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

20.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

21.

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

Goodman, Ellen

22.

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

Freud, Sigmund

23.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

24.

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

Murdoch, Iris

25.

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

26.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

27.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

28.

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

Burgess, Anthony

29.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

30.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

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.

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

33.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

35.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

36.

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

37.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

39.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

40.

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

41.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

42.

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

43.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

44.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

45.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

Rice, Anne

49.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

50.

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