Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Hutchens, John K.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Zinsser, William

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

Marquis, Don

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

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

Thurber, James

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.

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

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

10.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

12.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

13.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

14.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

15.

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

16.

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

Benchley, Robert

17.

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

18.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

19.

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

Rushdie, Salman

20.

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

Baldwin, James

21.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

22.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

23.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

24.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

25.

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

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

30.

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

Nunn, Gregory

31.

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

Anderson, Margaret

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Vries, Peter De

35.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

36.

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

Pascal, Blaise

37.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

38.

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

Woolf, Virginia

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

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

Faulkner, William

41.

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

42.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

43.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

44.

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

Bennett, Arnold

45.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

46.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

47.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

48.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

49.

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

50.

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

Horace