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

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

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

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

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

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

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

Hutchens, John K.

10.

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

Baldwin, James

11.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

12.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

13.

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

Rosten, Leo

14.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

15.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

16.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

17.

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

Kesey, Ken

18.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Duncan, Isadora

22.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

23.

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

24.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

25.

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

Steinem, Gloria

26.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

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

Liebling, A. J.

28.

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

Ferber, Edna

29.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

30.

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.

31.

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

Gribbon, George

32.

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

33.

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

Auden, W. H.

34.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

36.

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

Hazlitt, William

37.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

38.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

39.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

40.

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

41.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

42.

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

43.

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

Zinsser, William

44.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

Handke, Peter

46.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

47.

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.

48.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

49.

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

Butler, Samuel

50.

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