Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

- Maurois, Andre

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

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

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

10.

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

Marquis, Don

11.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

12.

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

13.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

14.

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

Forster, Edward M.

15.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

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

18.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

19.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

20.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

21.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

22.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

24.

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

Churchill, Charles

25.

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

Paz, Octavio

26.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Maurois, Andre

30.

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

Faulkner, William

31.

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

32.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

33.

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

Benchley, Robert

34.

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

35.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

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

37.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

38.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

40.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

41.

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

Steinem, Gloria

42.

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

Benchley, Robert

43.

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

Pascal, Blaise

44.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

45.

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

46.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

47.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

48.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

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

50.

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

Corbett, James J.