Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Martin, Judith

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Ellman, Lucy

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

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

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

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

10.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

11.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

13.

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

Nunn, Gregory

14.

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

15.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

16.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

17.

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

Pascal, Blaise

18.

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

Sand, George

19.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

20.

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

Doren, Carl Van

21.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

23.

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

Horace

24.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

25.

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

26.

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

Paz, Octavio

27.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

28.

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

Rice, Anne

29.

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

30.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

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

Byron, Lord

33.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

34.

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

Churchill, Charles

35.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

36.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

37.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

38.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

39.

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

Socrates

40.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

44.

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

Russell, Bertrand

45.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

49.

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

50.

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.