Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Marquis, Don

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

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.

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

Canetti, Elias

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

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

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

Nicolson, Harold

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

Ferber, Edna

11.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

12.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

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

15.

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

Horace

16.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

17.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

21.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

22.

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

23.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

24.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

25.

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

Faulkner, William

26.

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

27.

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

Kesey, Ken

28.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Collins, Jackie

34.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

35.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

36.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

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

38.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

39.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

40.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

41.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

42.

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

Benchley, Robert

43.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

44.

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

45.

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

46.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

47.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

48.

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