Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Kesey, Ken

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Bennett, Arnold

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

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

Zinsser, William

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

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

Rice, Anne

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

10.

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

Freud, Sigmund

11.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

12.

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

13.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

14.

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

Porter, Cole

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.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

17.

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

18.

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

19.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

21.

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.

22.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

23.

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

Collins, Jackie

24.

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

25.

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

Auden, W. H.

26.

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

27.

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

Thurber, James

28.

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

Mencken, H. L.

29.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

30.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

31.

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

Russell, Bertrand

32.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

33.

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

James, William

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

Duncan, Isadora

36.

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

37.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

38.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

39.

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

Ellman, Lucy

40.

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

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

43.

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

Churchill, Charles

44.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

45.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

46.

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

47.

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

Burgess, Anthony

48.

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

Pound, Ezra

49.

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

50.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis