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

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

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

Steinbeck, John

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Faulkner, William

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

10.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

11.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

12.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

13.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

14.

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

15.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

16.

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

Marx, Groucho

17.

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

Burgess, Anthony

18.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

19.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

23.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

24.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

25.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

26.

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.

27.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

28.

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

29.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

30.

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

31.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

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

Martin, Judith

35.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

36.

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

37.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

41.

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.

42.

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

Handke, Peter

43.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

44.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

48.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

49.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

50.

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