Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Landor, Walter Savage

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

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

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

10.

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

Porter, Cole

11.

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

12.

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

Nunn, Gregory

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

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

15.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

16.

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

Martin, Judith

17.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

18.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

19.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

20.

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

21.

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

22.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

23.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

24.

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

Horace

25.

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

26.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

27.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

31.

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

Doren, Carl Van

32.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

33.

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

Rice, Anne

34.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

35.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

36.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

38.

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

39.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

40.

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

41.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

42.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

43.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

45.

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

Corbett, James J.

46.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

47.

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

Benchley, Robert

48.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

49.

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

50.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.