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

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

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

Porter, Cole

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

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

10.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

11.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

13.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

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

15.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

16.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

17.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

18.

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

Joyce, James

19.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

23.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

24.

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

Faulkner, William

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

27.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

28.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

29.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

30.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

31.

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

32.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

33.

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

34.

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

Faulkner, William

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.

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

Horace

37.

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

38.

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

Benchley, Robert

39.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

40.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

41.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

42.

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

43.

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

Kesey, Ken

44.

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

45.

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

Collins, Jackie

46.

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

Steinem, Gloria

47.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

48.

Miller, Henry

49.

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

Auden, W. H.

50.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra