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

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

Martin, Judith

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

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

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.

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

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

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

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

Thurber, James

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

10.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

11.

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

12.

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

Swift, Jonathan

13.

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

Anderson, Margaret

14.

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

Shaw, Irwin

15.

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

Butler, Samuel

16.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

17.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

18.

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

19.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

20.

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

Miller, Olin

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

24.

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

Horace

25.

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

26.

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

Nunn, Gregory

27.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

28.

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

Mortimer, John

29.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

31.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

32.

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

Orwell, George

33.

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

Johnson, Samuel

34.

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

Vries, Peter De

35.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

39.

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

40.

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

Hazlitt, William

41.

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

Goodman, Ellen

42.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

43.

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

Bach, Richard

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Dennis, Patrick

47.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

48.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

49.

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

50.

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

Pascal, Blaise