Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

- Herford, Oliver

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

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

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

Kraus, Karl

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

Doren, Carl Van

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

Thurber, James

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

Asimov, Isaac

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

10.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

11.

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.

12.

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

Rushdie, Salman

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

16.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

17.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

19.

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

20.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

21.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

22.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

23.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

24.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

25.

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

26.

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

Pascal, Blaise

27.

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

Vries, Peter De

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

32.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

33.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

34.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

35.

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

36.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

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.

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

41.

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

Ellman, Lucy

42.

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

Nicolson, Harold

43.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

44.

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

45.

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

Rushdie, Salman

46.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

47.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

48.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

49.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

50.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.