Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

- Lemmon, Jack

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

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

Steinbeck, John

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

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

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

Gribbon, George

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

10.

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

Ellman, Lucy

11.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

12.

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

Paz, Octavio

13.

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

14.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

15.

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

16.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

17.

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

18.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

Raine, Craig

24.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

25.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

26.

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

27.

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

Freud, Sigmund

28.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

29.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

30.

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

Martin, Judith

31.

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.

32.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

33.

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

34.

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

Byron, Lord

35.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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.

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

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.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

39.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

40.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

41.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

42.

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

Faulkner, William

43.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

44.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

45.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

46.

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.

47.

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

Anderson, Margaret

48.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

49.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

50.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward