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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

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

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

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

Zinsser, William

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

10.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

11.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

12.

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

Bach, Richard

13.

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

14.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

15.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

16.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

17.

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

18.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

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

Hazlitt, William

21.

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

Steinbeck, John

22.

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

23.

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

Porter, Cole

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

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

27.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

28.

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

Handke, Peter

29.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

30.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

31.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

32.

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

Doren, Carl Van

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Pound, Ezra

39.

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

Zinsser, William

40.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

43.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

44.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

45.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

46.

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

47.

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

Benchley, Robert

48.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

49.

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

Dennis, Patrick

50.

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

Churchill, Charles