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

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Joyce, James

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

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

Hemingway, Ernest

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

10.

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

Rice, Anne

11.

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

Rushdie, Salman

12.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

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

Russell, Bertrand

14.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

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

Auden, W. H.

16.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

17.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

18.

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

Faulkner, William

19.

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

Asimov, Isaac

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

25.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

26.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

27.

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

28.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

30.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

31.

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

32.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

33.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

37.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

38.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

39.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

40.

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

41.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel

44.

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

45.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

47.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

48.

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

49.

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

Doren, Carl Van

50.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.