Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- James, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Butler, Samuel

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

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.

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

11.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

12.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

13.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

14.

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

15.

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

16.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

17.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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 ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

20.

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

21.

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

Russell, Bertrand

22.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

23.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

24.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

25.

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

26.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

27.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

31.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

32.

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

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

35.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

36.

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

37.

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

Kraus, Karl

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

42.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

43.

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

Nunn, Gregory

44.

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

45.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

46.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

47.

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

Miller, Olin

48.

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