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

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

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

Paz, Octavio

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Hazlitt, William

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

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

Churchill, Charles

10.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

11.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

12.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

13.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

17.

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

Rushdie, Salman

18.

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

19.

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

Ellman, Lucy

20.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

21.

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

Faulkner, William

22.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

23.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

25.

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

26.

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

Mortimer, John

27.

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

Doren, Carl Van

28.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

29.

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

Bach, Richard

30.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

31.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

32.

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

Zinsser, William

33.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

34.

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

Thurber, James

35.

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

Pascal, Blaise

36.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

37.

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

38.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

39.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

40.

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

Shaw, Irwin

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

44.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

Corbett, James J.

48.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

49.

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

50.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore