Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Benchley, Robert

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

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

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

Canetti, Elias

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

10.

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

11.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

12.

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

13.

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

Hazlitt, William

14.

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

Nunn, Gregory

15.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Orwell, George

17.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

18.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

19.

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

20.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

21.

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

22.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Rushdie, Salman

26.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

27.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

28.

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

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

31.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

32.

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

33.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Dyer, Wayne

37.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

38.

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

Faulkner, William

39.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

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

42.

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

Handke, Peter

43.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

45.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

46.

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

Bennett, Arnold

47.

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

48.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

49.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

50.

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

Raine, Craig