Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

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

Faulkner, William

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

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

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

10.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

11.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

12.

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

13.

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

Canetti, Elias

14.

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

Pascal, Blaise

15.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

16.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

17.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

18.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

19.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

23.

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

24.

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

Johnson, Samuel

25.

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

Hazlitt, William

26.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

27.

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

Rushdie, Salman

28.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

29.

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

Steinbeck, John

30.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

31.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

34.

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

35.

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

Collins, Jackie

36.

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

James, William

37.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

43.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

44.

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

45.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

46.

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

Faulkner, William

47.

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

48.

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

Orwell, George

49.

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

50.

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