Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

- Michener, James A.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Michener, James A.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

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

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

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

Handke, Peter

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

10.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

11.

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

Marquis, Don

12.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

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

Steinem, Gloria

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

Baldwin, James

17.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

18.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

19.

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

Marx, Groucho

20.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

21.

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

Faulkner, William

22.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

23.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

24.

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

25.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

26.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

27.

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

28.

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

29.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

30.

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

31.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

34.

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

35.

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

Hazlitt, William

36.

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

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

38.

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

39.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

40.

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

Asimov, Isaac

41.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

43.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

46.

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

Thurber, James

47.

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