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

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

Rushdie, Salman

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

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

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

Dyer, Wayne

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

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

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

10.

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

11.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

12.

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

13.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

14.

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

Byron, Lord

15.

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

Butler, Samuel

16.

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

Orwell, George

17.

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

18.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

19.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

20.

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

21.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

22.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

23.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

27.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

29.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

30.

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

31.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

32.

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

33.

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

Mortimer, John

34.

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

Joyce, James

35.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

36.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

37.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

38.

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

Faulkner, William

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

43.

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

Rushdie, Salman

44.

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

Freud, Sigmund

45.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

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

50.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig