Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Kesey, Ken

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Gribbon, George

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

Sand, George

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

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

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

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

11.

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

12.

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

Ellman, Lucy

13.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

21.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Bach, Richard

25.

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

26.

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

Mencken, H. L.

27.

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

Nunn, Gregory

28.

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

Rosten, Leo

29.

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

Hazlitt, William

30.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

31.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

32.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

33.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

34.

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

35.

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

Steinbeck, John

36.

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

Paz, Octavio

37.

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

38.

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

Martin, Judith

39.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

40.

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

41.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

42.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

43.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

44.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

45.

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

Pascal, Blaise

46.

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

Steinbeck, John

47.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

48.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.