Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

- Herford, Oliver

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Johnson, Samuel

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

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

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

Thurber, James

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

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

Woolf, Virginia

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

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

Rushdie, Salman

10.

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

11.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

16.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

18.

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

Faulkner, William

19.

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

20.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

23.

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

24.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Doren, Carl Van

29.

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

Byron, Lord

30.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

31.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

32.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

33.

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

Bennett, Arnold

34.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

35.

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

Kraus, Karl

36.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

37.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

38.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

39.

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

Orwell, George

40.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

41.

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

Liebling, A. J.

42.

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

43.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

44.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

45.

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

46.

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

Martin, Judith

47.

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

48.

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

Pascal, Blaise

49.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

50.

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

Churchill, Charles