Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

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

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

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

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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

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

Faulkner, William

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 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

11.

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

Asimov, Isaac

12.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

13.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

14.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

15.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

16.

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

Zinsser, William

17.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

18.

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

19.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

20.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

21.

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

Vries, Peter De

22.

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

23.

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

Dennis, Patrick

24.

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

Faulkner, William

25.

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

26.

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

Rice, Anne

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

31.

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

Thurber, James

32.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

33.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

34.

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

35.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

36.

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

Sand, George

37.

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.

38.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

39.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

40.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

41.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

42.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

43.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

44.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

48.

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

Rushdie, Salman

49.

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

50.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord