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

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

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

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

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

Kesey, Ken

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Faulkner, William

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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

Steinbeck, John

11.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

12.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

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

Liebling, A. J.

14.

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

Forster, Edward M.

15.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

17.

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

18.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

20.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

21.

Maurois, Andre

22.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

23.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

24.

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

25.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

26.

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

Steinem, Gloria

27.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

28.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

29.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

30.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

31.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

32.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

33.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

34.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

35.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

36.

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

37.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

38.

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

39.

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

Zinsser, William

40.

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

41.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

43.

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

44.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

45.

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

46.

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

47.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

48.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

49.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

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