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

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

Rushdie, Salman

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

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

Handke, Peter

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

Zinsser, William

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

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

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

10.

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

11.

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

Murdoch, Iris

12.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

19.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

20.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

26.

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

Ellman, Lucy

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

Pound, Ezra

29.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

31.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

35.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

36.

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

Porter, Cole

37.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

38.

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

Rushdie, Salman

39.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Steinem, Gloria

45.

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

46.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

47.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

48.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

49.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.