Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

- La Bruyere, Jean De

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

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

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

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

10.

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

11.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

12.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

14.

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

15.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

16.

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

Benchley, Robert

17.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

Zinsser, William

19.

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

20.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

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

22.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

23.

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

Woolf, Virginia

24.

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

25.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

26.

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

Nicolson, Harold

27.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

28.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

29.

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

30.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

31.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

32.

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

33.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

34.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

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

Russell, Bertrand

39.

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

Gribbon, George

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

47.

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

48.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

49.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

50.

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

Kraus, Karl