Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

- Mencken, H. L.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Boileau, Nicholas

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

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

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

10.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

11.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

12.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

13.

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

14.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

15.

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

Pascal, Blaise

16.

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

Steinem, Gloria

17.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

19.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Bennett, Arnold

23.

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

24.

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

Collins, Jackie

25.

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

Rushdie, Salman

26.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

27.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

28.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

29.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

30.

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

Faulkner, William

31.

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

32.

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

Duncan, Isadora

33.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

34.

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

35.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

36.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

37.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

41.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

43.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

44.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

45.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

46.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

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

48.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

49.

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

Faulkner, William

50.

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