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

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

Gribbon, George

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

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

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

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

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

Rice, Anne

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

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

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

10.

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

11.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

12.

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

Shaw, Irwin

13.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

14.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

15.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

16.

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

17.

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

Martin, Judith

18.

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

19.

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

Zinsser, William

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Steinem, Gloria

23.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

24.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

25.

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

26.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

27.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

28.

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

29.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

30.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

31.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

32.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

33.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

34.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

36.

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

Nicolson, Harold

37.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

38.

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

Churchill, Charles

39.

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

Murdoch, Iris

40.

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

41.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

42.

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

Pascal, Blaise

43.

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

44.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

45.

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

46.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

47.

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.

48.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

49.

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

Asimov, Isaac

50.

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