Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

- Mailer, Norman

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

10.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

11.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

12.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

13.

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

14.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

15.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

16.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

17.

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

18.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

19.

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

Vries, Peter De

20.

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

Bach, Richard

21.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

22.

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

23.

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

Russell, Bertrand

24.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

25.

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

26.

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

27.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

28.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

29.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Burgess, Anthony

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

34.

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

Liebling, A. J.

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

37.

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

38.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

39.

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

Mencken, H. L.

40.

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

Paz, Octavio

41.

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

42.

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

Bennett, Arnold

43.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

44.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

45.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

46.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

47.

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

48.

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

Pascal, Blaise

49.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

50.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia