Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

10.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

11.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

12.

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

Steinbeck, John

13.

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

James, William

14.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

15.

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

Sand, George

16.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

17.

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

Twain, Mark

18.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

19.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

20.

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

21.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

22.

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

23.

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

24.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

25.

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

26.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

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

Faulkner, William

28.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

Zinsser, William

34.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

40.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

41.

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

42.

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

Woolf, Virginia

43.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

44.

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

Burgess, Anthony

45.

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

Collins, Jackie

46.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

47.

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

Hazlitt, William

48.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

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.

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