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

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

Dennis, Patrick

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

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

Hazlitt, William

10.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

11.

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

Steinbeck, John

12.

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

Liebling, A. J.

13.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

14.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

15.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

16.

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

Porter, Cole

17.

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

Kraus, Karl

18.

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

19.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

21.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

22.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

23.

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

Churchill, Charles

24.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

25.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

26.

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

Doren, Carl Van

27.

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

28.

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

Handke, Peter

29.

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

30.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

31.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Steinbeck, John

40.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

43.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

44.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

46.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

47.

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

48.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

49.

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

50.

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

Bach, Richard