Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Rosten, Leo

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

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

Faulkner, William

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Hellman, Lillian

17.

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

18.

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

19.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

20.

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

Benchley, Robert

21.

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

Liebling, A. J.

22.

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

Russell, Bertrand

23.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

24.

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

25.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

26.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

27.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

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.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

35.

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

36.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

39.

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

Thurber, James

40.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

41.

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

Porter, Cole

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

Woolf, Virginia

45.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

50.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery