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

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

Raine, Craig

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Kraus, Karl

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

10.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

11.

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

Orwell, George

12.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

13.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

14.

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

Asimov, Isaac

15.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

16.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

18.

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

19.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

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

Pascal, Blaise

21.

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

Swift, Jonathan

22.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

23.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

24.

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

25.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

26.

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

27.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

28.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

29.

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

30.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

31.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

32.

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

Miller, Olin

33.

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

34.

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

Byron, Lord

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

38.

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

Butler, Samuel

39.

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

Vries, Peter De

40.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

41.

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

42.

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

43.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

44.

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.

45.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

46.

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

Baldwin, James

47.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

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

Gribbon, George

49.

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