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

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

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

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

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

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

10.

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

11.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

12.

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

Butler, Samuel

13.

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

14.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

Sontag, Susan

20.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

21.

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

Pound, Ezra

22.

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

23.

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

Mencken, H. L.

24.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

25.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

26.

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

Rushdie, Salman

27.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

28.

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

Steinbeck, John

29.

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.

30.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

31.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

32.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

33.

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

34.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

35.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

36.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

38.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

39.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

40.

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

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Faulkner, William

45.

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

Corbett, James J.

46.

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

Asimov, Isaac