Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

- Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

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

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

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

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

Rice, Anne

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

Kesey, Ken

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

10.

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

Faulkner, William

11.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

12.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

13.

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

Kraus, Karl

14.

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

15.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

Canetti, Elias

20.

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

Marx, Groucho

21.

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

22.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

Russell, Bertrand

25.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

26.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

27.

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

28.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

29.

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

Duncan, Isadora

30.

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

31.

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

Zinsser, William

32.

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

Ferber, Edna

33.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

34.

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

Hazlitt, William

35.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

36.

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

Faulkner, William

37.

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

Pascal, Blaise

38.

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

39.

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

Benchley, Robert

40.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

42.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

43.

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

Ellman, Lucy

44.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

Steinbeck, John

48.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

49.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

50.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.