Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

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

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

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

Boileau, Nicholas

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

Hutchens, John K.

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

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

13.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

15.

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

16.

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

Sontag, Susan

17.

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

Steinbeck, John

18.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

19.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

20.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

21.

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

22.

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

Rushdie, Salman

23.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

24.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

25.

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

Pound, Ezra

26.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

27.

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

28.

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

Rice, Anne

29.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

30.

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

Churchill, Charles

31.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

32.

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

Porter, Cole

33.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

34.

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

35.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

36.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

37.

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

Joyce, James

38.

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

Faulkner, William

39.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

40.

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

Woolf, Virginia

41.

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

42.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

43.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

44.

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

Sand, George

45.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

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

Hellman, Lillian

47.

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

48.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

49.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

50.

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