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

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

Horace

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

Sand, George

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Auden, W. H.

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

10.

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

11.

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

12.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

13.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

14.

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

15.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

17.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

22.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

23.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

24.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

25.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

26.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

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

28.

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

Hellman, Lillian

29.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

30.

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

Ellman, Lucy

31.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

32.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

33.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

34.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

Porter, Cole

38.

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

Ferber, Edna

39.

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.

40.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

41.

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

42.

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

Anderson, Margaret

43.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

44.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

45.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

46.

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

47.

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

Bennett, Arnold

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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