Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

- Horace

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

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

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

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

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

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

Faulkner, William

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

Vries, Peter De

11.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

12.

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

13.

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

Rosten, Leo

14.

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

Goodman, Ellen

15.

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

Bennett, Arnold

16.

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

Benchley, Robert

17.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

18.

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

19.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

21.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

27.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

29.

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

Pascal, Blaise

30.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

34.

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

Anderson, Margaret

35.

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

Martin, Judith

36.

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

37.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

38.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

39.

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

40.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

42.

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

43.

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

Dyer, Wayne

44.

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

Twain, Mark

45.

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

Handke, Peter

46.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

47.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

48.

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

49.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

50.

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.