Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

- 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

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

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

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

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

10.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

11.

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

Woolf, Virginia

12.

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

Hazlitt, William

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

18.

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

Zinsser, William

19.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

20.

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

Corbett, James J.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

26.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

27.

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

Zinsser, William

28.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

29.

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

30.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

31.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

36.

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

Porter, Cole

37.

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

Steinem, Gloria

38.

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

39.

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

Butler, Samuel

40.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

41.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

42.

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

43.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

45.

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

Pound, Ezra

46.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

47.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

48.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

49.

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

Nunn, Gregory

50.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?