Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Faulkner, William

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

Doren, Carl Van

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

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.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Pound, Ezra

10.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

11.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

13.

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

14.

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

Ellman, Lucy

15.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

16.

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

17.

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

Baldwin, James

18.

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

19.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

21.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

22.

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

Mortimer, John

23.

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

24.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

25.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

26.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

27.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

Byron, Lord

31.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

32.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

33.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

34.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

35.

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

36.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

37.

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

38.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

39.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

40.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

41.

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

42.

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

Faulkner, William

43.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

45.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

46.

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

47.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

48.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

49.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

50.

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