Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

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

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

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

10.

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

11.

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

Burgess, Anthony

12.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

13.

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

14.

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

Orwell, George

15.

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

16.

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

Handke, Peter

17.

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

18.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

19.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Horace

23.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

24.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

25.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

26.

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

Anderson, Margaret

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

34.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

36.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

37.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

38.

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

Hellman, Lillian

39.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

40.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

41.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.