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

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

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

Orwell, George

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

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

Faulkner, William

10.

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

Duncan, Isadora

11.

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

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

14.

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

15.

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

Mortimer, John

16.

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

17.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

18.

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

Steinem, Gloria

19.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

20.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

Horace

26.

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.

27.

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

Burgess, Anthony

28.

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

29.

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

30.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

32.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

33.

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

34.

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

Doren, Carl Van

35.

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

Rice, Anne

36.

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

Paz, Octavio

37.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

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

Steinbeck, John

39.

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

40.

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

Bennett, Arnold

41.

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

Pound, Ezra

42.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

43.

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

Shaw, Irwin

44.

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

James, William

45.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

46.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

47.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

48.

Mcewan, Ian

49.

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

50.

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