Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Kesey, Ken

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

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

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.

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

Zinsser, William

12.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

13.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

14.

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

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The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

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

Collins, Jackie

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

20.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

22.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

23.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

24.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

25.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

26.

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.

27.

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

Woolf, Virginia

28.

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

29.

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

Pound, Ezra

30.

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

31.

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

Doren, Carl Van

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Nunn, Gregory

35.

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

Russell, Bertrand

36.

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

37.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

38.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

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

40.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

43.

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

Handke, Peter

44.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

45.

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

46.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise