Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

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

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

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

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

Corbett, James J.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

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

Doren, Carl Van

10.

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

Pound, Ezra

11.

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

Handke, Peter

12.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

13.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

17.

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

18.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

Hutchens, John K.

20.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

21.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

22.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Burgess, Anthony

26.

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

27.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

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

Nunn, Gregory

29.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

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.

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.

32.

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

33.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

34.

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

Hazlitt, William

35.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

36.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

37.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

38.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

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

41.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Woolf, Virginia

46.

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

47.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

48.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

50.

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