Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

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

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.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

10.

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

Russell, Bertrand

11.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

21.

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

Hellman, Lillian

22.

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

Pound, Ezra

23.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

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

Corbett, James J.

25.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

26.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

27.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

28.

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

29.

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

30.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

31.

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

32.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

33.

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

Kesey, Ken

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Porter, Cole

39.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Woolf, Virginia

43.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

44.

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

45.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

46.

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

Vries, Peter De

47.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

49.

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

50.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret