Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

- Herford, Oliver

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Pound, Ezra

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

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

10.

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

Vries, Peter De

11.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

12.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

13.

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

Pascal, Blaise

14.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

18.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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

20.

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

Bach, Richard

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

24.

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

Steinbeck, John

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Swift, Jonathan

28.

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

Benchley, Robert

29.

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

Dyer, Wayne

30.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

31.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

32.

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

Miller, Olin

33.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

34.

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

Byron, Lord

35.

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

36.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

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

Anderson, Margaret

39.

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

40.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

41.

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

Asimov, Isaac

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

44.

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

45.

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

Twain, Mark

46.

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

47.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho