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

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

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

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

Horace

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

Martin, Judith

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

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

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

Ferber, Edna

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

10.

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

Johnson, Samuel

11.

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.

12.

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

Baldwin, James

13.

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

Churchill, Charles

14.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

15.

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

Orwell, George

16.

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

17.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

18.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

19.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

21.

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

Benchley, Robert

22.

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

Steinbeck, John

23.

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

Thurber, James

24.

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

Asimov, Isaac

25.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

29.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

30.

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

Pascal, Blaise

31.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

32.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

33.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

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

Steinbeck, John

35.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

36.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

37.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

38.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

39.

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

Mortimer, John

40.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

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

Faulkner, William

42.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

43.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

44.

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

Rushdie, Salman

45.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

46.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

47.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

48.

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

Liebling, A. J.

49.

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

Hellman, Lillian

50.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.