Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Kesey, Ken

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Faulkner, William

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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

10.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

11.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

12.

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

Bach, Richard

13.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

14.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

15.

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

16.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

21.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

22.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

23.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

24.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

25.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

26.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

27.

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

Pound, Ezra

28.

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

Hellman, Lillian

29.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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

32.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

33.

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

Steinem, Gloria

34.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

35.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

36.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

37.

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

38.

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

Corbett, James J.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Hutchens, John K.

42.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

43.

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

Zinsser, William

44.

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

Nunn, Gregory

45.

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

Kesey, Ken

46.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

47.

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

48.

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

Zinsser, William

49.

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

50.

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.