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 writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

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

Rushdie, Salman

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

Corbett, James J.

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Rice, Anne

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

10.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

12.

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.

13.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

14.

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

Zinsser, William

15.

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

Faulkner, William

16.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

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

18.

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

Swift, Jonathan

19.

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

Collins, Jackie

20.

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

Paz, Octavio

21.

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

22.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

23.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

24.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

25.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

26.

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

27.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

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

29.

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

Canetti, Elias

30.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

31.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

32.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

33.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

34.

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

Faulkner, William

35.

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

36.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

37.

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

38.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

39.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

40.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

41.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Shaw, Irwin

45.

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

46.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

47.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

48.

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

Dyer, Wayne

49.

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