Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

- Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

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

Hazlitt, William

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Steinem, Gloria

13.

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

Pound, Ezra

14.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

20.

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

Shaw, Irwin

21.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

22.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

23.

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

Kesey, Ken

24.

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

Orwell, George

25.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

26.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

27.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

28.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

29.

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

Bach, Richard

30.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

32.

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

Mortimer, John

33.

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

Auden, W. H.

34.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

35.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

36.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

37.

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

38.

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

Woolf, Virginia

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Duncan, Isadora

43.

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

Murdoch, Iris

44.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

45.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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