Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hazlitt, William

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

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

Bach, Richard

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

Kesey, Ken

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

10.

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

Goodman, Ellen

11.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

12.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

13.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

14.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

15.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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

Murdoch, Iris

20.

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

21.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

22.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

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.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

25.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

30.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

31.

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

Raine, Craig

32.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

33.

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

34.

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

Freud, Sigmund

35.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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.

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

40.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

41.

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

Thurber, James

42.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

43.

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

Shaw, Irwin

44.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

45.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

46.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

47.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

48.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

49.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

50.

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