Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Liebling, A. J.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

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

Landor, Walter Savage

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

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

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

Collins, Jackie

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

10.

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.

11.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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.

13.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

14.

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

Rushdie, Salman

15.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

16.

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

17.

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

Zinsser, William

18.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

19.

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

20.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

21.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

22.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

23.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

24.

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

25.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

27.

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

Joyce, James

28.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

29.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

30.

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

Marquis, Don

31.

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

Duncan, Isadora

32.

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

33.

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

34.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

37.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

38.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

39.

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

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Kesey, Ken

43.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

44.

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

Byron, Lord

45.

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

Orwell, George

46.

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

Benchley, Robert

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

49.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

50.

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

Zinsser, William