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

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

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

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

Naipaul, V. S.

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

Rushdie, Salman

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

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

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Forster, Edward M.

10.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

11.

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

12.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

13.

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

14.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

15.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

16.

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

Vries, Peter De

17.

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

18.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

Dennis, Patrick

20.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

21.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

22.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

23.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

29.

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

Nunn, Gregory

30.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

31.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

32.

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

Thurber, James

33.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

34.

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

Collins, Jackie

35.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

36.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

37.

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.

38.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

40.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

41.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

42.

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

43.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

44.

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

45.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

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

50.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace