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

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

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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

Zinsser, William

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

Pound, Ezra

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

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

Liebling, A. J.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

10.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

12.

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

Nicolson, Harold

13.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

14.

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

Thurber, James

15.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

16.

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

Kraus, Karl

17.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

18.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

19.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

20.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

21.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

22.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

23.

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

24.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

25.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

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.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

28.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

29.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

32.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

33.

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

Orwell, George

34.

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

35.

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

Murdoch, Iris

36.

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

Martin, Judith

37.

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

38.

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

Thurber, James

39.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

40.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

Sand, George

48.

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

Freud, Sigmund

49.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

50.

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