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

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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

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

Rice, Anne

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

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

Landor, Walter Savage

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

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

Vries, Peter De

10.

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

Ellman, Lucy

11.

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

12.

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

13.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

14.

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

Hellman, Lillian

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

18.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

19.

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

20.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

21.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

22.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

23.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

24.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

26.

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

Steinem, Gloria

27.

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

Freud, Sigmund

28.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

29.

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

Murdoch, Iris

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Twain, Mark

36.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

37.

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

38.

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

Liebling, A. J.

39.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

40.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

41.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

42.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

43.

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

Woolf, Virginia

44.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

45.

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

Hellman, Lillian

46.

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

Hutchens, John K.

47.

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

48.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

49.

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

50.

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

Gribbon, George