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

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

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Zinsser, William

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

Porter, Cole

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

Hutchens, John K.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Paz, Octavio

12.

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.

13.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

14.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

15.

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

16.

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.

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.

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

19.

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

Corbett, James J.

20.

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

21.

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

Freud, Sigmund

22.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

23.

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

Steinbeck, John

24.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

25.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

26.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

27.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

28.

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

Faulkner, William

29.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

30.

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

31.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

32.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

33.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

34.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

35.

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

36.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

37.

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

Mortimer, John

38.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

39.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

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

Rushdie, Salman

41.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

42.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

43.

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

44.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

45.

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

46.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

47.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

48.

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

Bennett, Arnold

49.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

50.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin