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 never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

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

Benchley, Robert

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

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

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

10.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

11.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Nunn, Gregory

16.

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

Asimov, Isaac

17.

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

18.

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

19.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

20.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

21.

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

Goodman, Ellen

22.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

23.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

24.

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

25.

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

Butler, Samuel

26.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

27.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

28.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

29.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

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

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

33.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Rushdie, Salman

37.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

38.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

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

40.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

41.

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

Thurber, James

42.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

46.

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

47.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

48.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.