Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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.

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

Steinbeck, John

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

Sontag, Susan

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Fowler, Gene

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

10.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

11.

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

Faulkner, William

12.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

14.

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

Bennett, Arnold

15.

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

Hutchens, John K.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Thurber, James

21.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

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

Faulkner, William

23.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

26.

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

Shaw, Irwin

27.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

28.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

29.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

30.

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

31.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

32.

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

Bach, Richard

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

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.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

38.

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

39.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

40.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

46.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

47.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

48.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

49.

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

50.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks