Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

- Joyce, James

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Orwell, George

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

Hemingway, Ernest

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

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

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

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

Faulkner, William

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

Horace

10.

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

11.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

13.

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

14.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

15.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

16.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

17.

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

18.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

19.

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

20.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

21.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

22.

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

23.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

24.

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

25.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

26.

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

Woolf, Virginia

27.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

28.

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.

29.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

30.

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

31.

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

Duncan, Isadora

32.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

33.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

34.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

35.

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

36.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

37.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

38.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

39.

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

40.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

41.

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

Pascal, Blaise

42.

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

Shaw, Irwin

43.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

44.

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

45.

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

Nunn, Gregory

46.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

47.

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

48.

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

Anderson, Margaret

49.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

50.

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

Rice, Anne