Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

- Johnson, Samuel

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

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

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

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

Thurber, James

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

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

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Faulkner, William

10.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

11.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

12.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

13.

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

Thurber, James

14.

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

Rushdie, Salman

15.

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

16.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

17.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

18.

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

Byron, Lord

19.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Butler, Samuel

23.

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

Swift, Jonathan

24.

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

25.

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

Benchley, Robert

26.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

27.

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

Mortimer, John

28.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

29.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

30.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

32.

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

Ferber, Edna

33.

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

34.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

35.

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

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

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

James, William

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

42.

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

Faulkner, William

43.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

44.

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

Nunn, Gregory

45.

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

Dennis, Patrick

46.

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

47.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

48.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

49.

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

50.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith