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

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

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

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

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

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

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Steinem, Gloria

10.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

11.

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

Faulkner, William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

16.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

17.

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

Rushdie, Salman

18.

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

Pascal, Blaise

19.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

20.

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.

21.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

22.

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

Forster, Edward M.

23.

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

24.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

25.

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

26.

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

Gribbon, George

27.

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

James, William

28.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

29.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

31.

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

Collins, Jackie

32.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

33.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

34.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

35.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

39.

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

40.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

43.

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

44.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

46.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

47.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

48.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

49.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

50.

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

Pound, Ezra