Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hutchens, John K.

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

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

Thurber, James

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.

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

Mencken, H. L.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

10.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

11.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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.

13.

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

Orwell, George

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

17.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

18.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

19.

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

Woolf, Virginia

20.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

21.

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

Kesey, Ken

22.

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

Steinbeck, John

23.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

24.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

25.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

26.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

27.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

28.

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

Pound, Ezra

29.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

34.

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

Burgess, Anthony

35.

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

36.

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

Rice, Anne

37.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

38.

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

39.

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

Churchill, Charles

40.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

41.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

42.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

43.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

44.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

46.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

48.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

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

50.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman