Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

- Herford, Oliver

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Joyce, James

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

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

Liebling, A. J.

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

Butler, Samuel

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

Pound, Ezra

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

10.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

11.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

12.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

13.

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

14.

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

Faulkner, William

15.

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.

16.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

17.

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

18.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

19.

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

20.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

21.

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

22.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

23.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

24.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

25.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

26.

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

Kesey, Ken

27.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

28.

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

29.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

30.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

33.

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

Anderson, Margaret

34.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

35.

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

Steinbeck, John

36.

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

37.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

38.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

39.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

41.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

42.

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

Kraus, Karl

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Dyer, Wayne

46.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

47.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

48.

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

49.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

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

Benchley, Robert