Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Byron, Lord

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

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

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

Corbett, James J.

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.

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

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

10.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

11.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

12.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

13.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

14.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

15.

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

16.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

17.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

18.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

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.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

22.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

23.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

24.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

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.

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

Woolf, Virginia

27.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

28.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

29.

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

Hutchens, John K.

30.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

31.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

32.

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

Asimov, Isaac

33.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

34.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

35.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

36.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

37.

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

38.

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

Ellman, Lucy

39.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

40.

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