Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

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

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

Faulkner, William

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

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

Kesey, Ken

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

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

10.

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

Rice, Anne

11.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

12.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

13.

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

Murdoch, Iris

14.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

15.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

16.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

17.

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

18.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Zinsser, William

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

25.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

26.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

27.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

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

29.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

34.

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

Martin, Judith

35.

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

Johnson, Samuel

36.

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

37.

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

Goodman, Ellen

38.

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

39.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

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

Burgess, Anthony

41.

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

Thurber, James

42.

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

43.

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

Freud, Sigmund

44.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

Raine, Craig

46.

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