Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

10.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

11.

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

12.

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

Pound, Ezra

13.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

15.

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

16.

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

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.

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

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

20.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

21.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

22.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

23.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

24.

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

Sand, George

25.

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

Woolf, Virginia

26.

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

Forster, Edward M.

27.

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

28.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

29.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

31.

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

Bennett, Arnold

32.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

33.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

34.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

35.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

36.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

37.

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

38.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

39.

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

40.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

41.

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

Marquis, Don

42.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

43.

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

44.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

45.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

46.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

47.

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.

48.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

49.

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

Butler, Samuel

50.

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