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

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

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

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

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.

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

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

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

10.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

11.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

12.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

13.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

14.

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

Rushdie, Salman

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.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

17.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

18.

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

Martin, Judith

19.

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

20.

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

Baldwin, James

21.

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

Woolf, Virginia

22.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

25.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

26.

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

27.

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

Asimov, Isaac

28.

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

Orwell, George

29.

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

30.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

31.

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

32.

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

Woolf, Virginia

33.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

34.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

35.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

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

Faulkner, William

37.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

38.

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

Nunn, Gregory

39.

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

Hellman, Lillian

40.

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

41.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

42.

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

Rushdie, Salman

43.

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

Porter, Cole

44.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

45.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

46.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

48.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

49.

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

Ferber, Edna

50.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston