Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

Liebling, A. J.

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

Sand, George

10.

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

Rushdie, Salman

11.

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

James, William

12.

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

13.

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

Hellman, Lillian

14.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

15.

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

Pound, Ezra

16.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Paz, Octavio

21.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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

Doren, Carl Van

23.

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.

24.

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

Pascal, Blaise

25.

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

Woolf, Virginia

26.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

27.

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

28.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

29.

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

Benchley, Robert

30.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

31.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

32.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

Kesey, Ken

36.

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

37.

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

Rosten, Leo

38.

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

Rushdie, Salman

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

44.

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

45.

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

Kraus, Karl

46.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

47.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

48.

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

Rice, Anne

49.

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

Mencken, H. L.

50.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.