Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Kraus, Karl

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

Goodman, Ellen

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

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

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

Doren, Carl Van

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

10.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

11.

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

12.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

15.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

16.

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

Asimov, Isaac

17.

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

Porter, Cole

18.

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

19.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

20.

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

21.

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

Corbett, James J.

22.

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

Raine, Craig

23.

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

Benchley, Robert

24.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

25.

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

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

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

Anderson, Margaret

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

32.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

33.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

34.

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

35.

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

Miller, Olin

36.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

37.

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

Nunn, Gregory

38.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

39.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

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

Martin, Judith

41.

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

Steinbeck, John

42.

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

43.

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

Rushdie, Salman

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Rushdie, Salman

48.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

49.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

50.

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