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

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

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

James, William

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

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

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

Nunn, Gregory

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

10.

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

Pound, Ezra

11.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Thurber, James

15.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

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

17.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

18.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

19.

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

20.

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

Zinsser, William

21.

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

Hellman, Lillian

22.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

23.

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

24.

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

Faulkner, William

25.

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

Porter, Cole

26.

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

27.

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

Byron, Lord

28.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

29.

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

30.

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

Dennis, Patrick

31.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

32.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

33.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Baldwin, James

37.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

38.

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

39.

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

Duncan, Isadora

40.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

41.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

42.

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

43.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

44.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

45.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

46.

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

47.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

48.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

49.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

50.

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

Gribbon, George