Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

- Miller, Henry

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Swift, Jonathan

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

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

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

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

10.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

11.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

12.

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

Bennett, Arnold

13.

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

Murdoch, Iris

14.

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.

15.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

16.

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

Auden, W. H.

17.

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

Sontag, Susan

18.

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

Baldwin, James

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Dennis, Patrick

22.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

23.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

24.

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

25.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

26.

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

27.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

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

29.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

30.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

31.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

34.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

35.

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

Liebling, A. J.

36.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

37.

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

Duncan, Isadora

38.

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

Pascal, Blaise

39.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Bach, Richard

41.

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

42.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

43.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

44.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

45.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

47.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

48.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

49.

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

50.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.