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

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

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

Wilde, Oscar

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Canetti, Elias

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

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.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

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

Horace

11.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

12.

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

Rushdie, Salman

13.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

14.

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

Steinbeck, John

15.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

16.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

17.

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

Freud, Sigmund

18.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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.

20.

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

Collins, Jackie

21.

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

Gribbon, George

22.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

23.

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

Zinsser, William

24.

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

Baldwin, James

25.

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

26.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

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

Corbett, James J.

28.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

29.

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

Swift, Jonathan

30.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

31.

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

Hazlitt, William

32.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

33.

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

34.

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

Thurber, James

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

Marquis, Don

38.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

39.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

40.

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

Faulkner, William

41.

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

Duncan, Isadora

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

46.

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

Ellman, Lucy

47.

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

48.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

49.

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

50.

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

Anderson, Margaret