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

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

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

Burgess, Anthony

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Hemingway, Ernest

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

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.

10.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

11.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

12.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

13.

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

14.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

15.

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

Pascal, Blaise

16.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

17.

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

Canetti, Elias

18.

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

Benchley, Robert

19.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

20.

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

Byron, Lord

21.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

22.

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

23.

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

Swift, Jonathan

24.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

25.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

26.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

27.

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

Rushdie, Salman

28.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

29.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

30.

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

Ferber, Edna

31.

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

32.

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

Dennis, Patrick

33.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

34.

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

Hellman, Lillian

35.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

36.

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

37.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

38.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

39.

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

Liebling, A. J.

40.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

41.

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

Miller, Olin

42.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

43.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

44.

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

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

46.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

47.

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

Gribbon, George

48.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

49.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

50.

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