Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Lawrence, D. H.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

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

Corbett, James J.

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.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Zinsser, William

10.

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

Paz, Octavio

11.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

12.

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.

13.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

Forster, Edward M.

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

18.

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

Miller, Olin

19.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

20.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

21.

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

Collins, Jackie

22.

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

Ellman, Lucy

23.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

24.

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

25.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

27.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

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

Anderson, Margaret

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

Freud, Sigmund

31.

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

32.

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

James, William

33.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

34.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

35.

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

36.

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

Pascal, Blaise

37.

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

Marquis, Don

38.

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

Martin, Judith

39.

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

40.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

41.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

42.

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

Horace

43.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

44.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

Nicolson, Harold

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

49.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

50.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita