Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

- Mailer, Norman

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Rushdie, Salman

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

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

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

Paz, Octavio

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

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

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

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

11.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

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

Freud, Sigmund

13.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

14.

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

Butler, Samuel

15.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

16.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

18.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

19.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

20.

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

21.

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

Porter, Cole

22.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

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

24.

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

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.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

29.

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

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

32.

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

Nunn, Gregory

33.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

34.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

35.

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

Bach, Richard

36.

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

37.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

38.

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

Gribbon, George

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.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

41.

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

Thurber, James

42.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

43.

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

Rushdie, Salman

44.

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

45.

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

Johnson, Samuel

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Benchley, Robert

49.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

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