Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

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

Marquis, Don

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

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

Nicolson, Harold

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

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

Ferber, Edna

10.

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

11.

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

Russell, Bertrand

12.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

13.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

14.

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

Zinsser, William

15.

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

16.

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

Paz, Octavio

17.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

18.

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

Mencken, H. L.

19.

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

Ellman, Lucy

20.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

22.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

23.

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

Pascal, Blaise

24.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

27.

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

Baldwin, James

28.

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.

29.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

30.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

31.

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

32.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Steinbeck, John

37.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

38.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

39.

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

Mortimer, John

40.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

41.

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

42.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

43.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

44.

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

Rice, Anne

45.

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.

46.

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

Byron, Lord

47.

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

48.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

49.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

50.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo