Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

10.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

11.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

13.

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

14.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

18.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

19.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

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

21.

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

22.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

23.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

24.

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

25.

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

Nunn, Gregory

26.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

28.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

29.

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

30.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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

32.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

33.

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

34.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

35.

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

36.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

37.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

41.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

43.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

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

Burgess, Anthony

45.

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

46.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

47.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

50.

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