Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

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

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

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

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

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

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

10.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

11.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

12.

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

13.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

14.

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

15.

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

Hutchens, John K.

16.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Landor, Walter Savage

19.

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

20.

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

Duncan, Isadora

21.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

22.

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

23.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

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.

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.

26.

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

27.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

28.

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

29.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

30.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

31.

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

32.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

33.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

34.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

38.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

39.

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

Gribbon, George

40.

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

Zinsser, William

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.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

43.

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

Raine, Craig

44.

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

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

Mcewan, Ian

47.

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

48.

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

Porter, Cole

49.

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

Pound, Ezra

50.

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