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

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

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

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

Marquis, Don

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

10.

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

11.

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

12.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

13.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

14.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

15.

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

16.

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

Steinbeck, John

17.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

18.

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

19.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

20.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

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.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

28.

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

29.

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

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.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

32.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

33.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

37.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

38.

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

39.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

40.

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

Kraus, Karl

41.

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

42.

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

Faulkner, William

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

45.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

46.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

47.

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

Canetti, Elias

48.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

49.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

50.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.