Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Kesey, Ken

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Asimov, Isaac

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

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

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

10.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

11.

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

Shaw, Irwin

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Mencken, H. L.

15.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

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

17.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

18.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

19.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

20.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

21.

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

Rosten, Leo

22.

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

23.

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

Auden, W. H.

24.

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

Rice, Anne

25.

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

Bach, Richard

26.

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

Zinsser, William

27.

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

28.

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

Horace

29.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

30.

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

31.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

32.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

33.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

34.

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

Churchill, Charles

35.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

36.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

37.

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

Gribbon, George

38.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

39.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

40.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

41.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

42.

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

43.

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

Duncan, Isadora

44.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

45.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

46.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Steinem, Gloria

50.

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

Steinbeck, John