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

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

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

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Churchill, Charles

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

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

Steinbeck, John

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

10.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

11.

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

Anderson, Margaret

12.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

13.

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

14.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

15.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

16.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

17.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

18.

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

19.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

20.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

21.

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

22.

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

Kraus, Karl

23.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

24.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

25.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

26.

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

Nunn, Gregory

27.

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

28.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

29.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

30.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

31.

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.

32.

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

Marquis, Don

33.

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

34.

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

Mortimer, John

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

38.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

39.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

Bach, Richard

43.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

44.

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

45.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

46.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

47.

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

48.

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

Dyer, Wayne

49.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

50.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.