Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

- Leon, Inigo de

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Naipaul, V. S.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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

Anderson, Margaret

10.

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

Forster, Edward M.

11.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

12.

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

Gribbon, George

13.

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

Hazlitt, William

14.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

16.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

20.

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

21.

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

Rice, Anne

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

25.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

26.

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

Duncan, Isadora

27.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

28.

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

Marquis, Don

29.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

30.

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

31.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

32.

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

Handke, Peter

33.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

34.

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

35.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

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

Baldwin, James

38.

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

39.

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

Burgess, Anthony

40.

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

41.

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

42.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

43.

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

44.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Zinsser, William

48.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

49.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

50.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.