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

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

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.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Martin, Judith

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

11.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

12.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

13.

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

Pound, Ezra

14.

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

Rushdie, Salman

15.

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

16.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

17.

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

18.

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

Mortimer, John

19.

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

20.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

21.

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

Nicolson, Harold

22.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Anderson, Margaret

26.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

27.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

28.

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

Liebling, A. J.

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

Raine, Craig

31.

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

32.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

33.

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

34.

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

35.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

36.

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

37.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

38.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

39.

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

Dennis, Patrick

40.

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

Faulkner, William

41.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

44.

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

Bennett, Arnold

45.

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

Hellman, Lillian

46.

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

47.

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

Dyer, Wayne

48.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

49.

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

Thurber, James

50.

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