Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

- Kraus, Karl

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Martin, Judith

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

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

Dennis, Patrick

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

Kraus, Karl

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

10.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

15.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

16.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

18.

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

Nunn, Gregory

19.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

20.

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

21.

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

Bach, Richard

22.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

23.

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

Mencken, H. L.

24.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

25.

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

Kesey, Ken

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

29.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

30.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

31.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

35.

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

Woolf, Virginia

36.

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

Rice, Anne

37.

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

Raine, Craig

38.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

39.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

40.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

41.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

43.

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

44.

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

Benchley, Robert

45.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

49.

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

50.

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

Pound, Ezra