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

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

Byron, Lord

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

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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

Marquis, Don

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

10.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

11.

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

Freud, Sigmund

12.

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

Swift, Jonathan

13.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

14.

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

15.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

16.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

17.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

18.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

19.

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

Canetti, Elias

20.

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

Paz, Octavio

21.

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

Woolf, Virginia

22.

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

Woolf, Virginia

23.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

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

Steinbeck, John

25.

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

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.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

28.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

29.

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

Porter, Cole

30.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

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.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

33.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

34.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

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.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

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

Joyce, James

39.

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

40.

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

41.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

42.

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

Butler, Samuel

43.

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

Bennett, Arnold

44.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

45.

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

46.

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

Collins, Jackie

47.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

48.

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

49.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

50.

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