Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

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

Butler, Samuel

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

10.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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

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.

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

15.

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

Nunn, Gregory

16.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

17.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

18.

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

19.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

20.

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

21.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

22.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

26.

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.

27.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

30.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

31.

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

Mortimer, John

32.

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

Baldwin, James

33.

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

34.

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

35.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

36.

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

Joyce, James

37.

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

Mencken, H. L.

38.

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

Rosten, Leo

39.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

41.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

42.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

43.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

44.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

Corbett, James J.

46.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

47.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

48.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

49.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

50.

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