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

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

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

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

Joyce, James

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

Thurber, James

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

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

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

Faulkner, William

10.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

11.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

12.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

13.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

14.

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

15.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

16.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

17.

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

18.

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

Churchill, Charles

19.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

20.

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

Marx, Groucho

21.

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

Porter, Cole

22.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

26.

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

Duncan, Isadora

27.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

35.

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

Steinem, Gloria

36.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

37.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

38.

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

Hellman, Lillian

39.

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.

40.

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

Butler, Samuel

41.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

42.

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

43.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

44.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

48.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

49.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

50.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.