Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Rushdie, Salman

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

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

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

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Boileau, Nicholas

10.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

11.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

12.

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

Raine, Craig

13.

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

Asimov, Isaac

14.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

15.

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

16.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

17.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

18.

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

Steinbeck, John

19.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

20.

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

21.

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

22.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

23.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

24.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

25.

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

Hazlitt, William

26.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

27.

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

28.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

29.

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

30.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

34.

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

35.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

36.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

37.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

38.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

39.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

40.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

44.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

45.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

46.

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

47.

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

Sontag, Susan

48.

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

49.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

50.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.