Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

- Mailer, Norman

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

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

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

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

Asimov, Isaac

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

Collins, Jackie

10.

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

11.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

12.

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

Rushdie, Salman

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

16.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

21.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

22.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

23.

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

Benchley, Robert

24.

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.

25.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

26.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

30.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

Baldwin, James

32.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

33.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

34.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

35.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

36.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

37.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

38.

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

Burgess, Anthony

39.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

41.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

42.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

44.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Vries, Peter De

49.

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

50.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest