Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

- Horace

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Hutchens, John K.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Goodman, Ellen

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

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

10.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

12.

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

Dyer, Wayne

13.

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

Marquis, Don

14.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

15.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

16.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

18.

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

19.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

20.

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

21.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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

23.

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

24.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

25.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

26.

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

27.

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

Vries, Peter De

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

30.

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

31.

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

Miller, Olin

32.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

33.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

34.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

35.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

36.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

37.

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.

38.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

39.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

40.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

41.

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

Benchley, Robert

42.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

Nicolson, Harold

44.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

45.

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

Rushdie, Salman

46.

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

Asimov, Isaac

47.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

48.

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

Wilde, Oscar

49.

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

50.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama